we regulated it.

"The clock is always slow in winter," said he, "because of the iron
working."

After becoming somewhat accustomed to the elevation, I began to look
around. There were the Oakwood barracks, the upper barracks,
Bigelberg, and lastly, opposite me, Quatre-Vents, and the house of Aunt
Gredel, from the chimney of which a thread of blue smoke rose toward
the sky. And I saw the kitchen, and imagined Catharine, in sabots, and
woollen skirt, spinning at the corner of the hearth and thinking of me.
I no longer felt the cold; I could not take my eyes from their cottage.

Father Brainstein, who did not know what I was looking at, said:

"Yes, yes, Monsieur Joseph: now all the roads are covered with people
in spite of the snow. The news has already spread, and every one wants
to know the extent of his loss."

He was right; every road and path was covered with people coming to the
city; and looking in the court, I saw the crowd increasing every moment
before the guard-house, the town-house, and the postoffice. A deep
murmur arose from the mass.

At length, after a last, long look at Catharine's house, I had to
descend, and we went down the dark, winding stairs, as if descending
into a well. Once in the organ-loft, we saw that the crowd had greatly
increased in the church; all the mothers, the sisters, the old
grandmothers, the rich, and the poor, were kneeling on the benches in
the midst of the deepest silence; they prayed for the absent, offering
all only to see them once again.

At first I did not realize all this; but suddenly the thought that, if
I had gone the year before, Catharine would be there, praying and
asking me of God, fell like a bolt on my heart, and I felt all my body
tremble.

"Let us go! let us go!" I exclaimed, "this is terrible."

"What is?" he asked.

"War."

We descended the stairs under the great gate, and I went across the
court to the house of Monsieur the Commandant Meunier, while Brainstein
took the way to his house.

At the corner of the Hotel de Ville, I saw a sight which I shall
remember all my life. There, around a placard, were more than five
hundred people, men and women crowded against each other, all pale, and
with necks outstretched, gazing at it as at some horrible apparition.
They could not read it, and from time to time one would say in German
or French:

"But they are not all dead! Some will return."

Others cried out:

"Let us see it! let us get n