ived with the belief desirable by
the skeptics of Pall Mall.

So the De Profundis was said over Bertie Cecil; and "Beauty of the
Brigades" ceased to be named in the service, and soon ceased to be even
remembered. In the steeple-chase of life there is no time to look back
at the failures, who have gone down over a "double and drop," and fallen
out of the pace.

CHAPTER XV.

"L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU."

"Did I not say he would eat fire?"

"Pardieu! C'est un brave."

"Rides like an Arab."

"Smokes like a Zouave."

"Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep--ah--h----h!
magnificent!"

"And dances like an Aristocrat; not like a tipsy Spahi!"

The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the circle
of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of inimitable
canteen-slang and camp-assurance, from a speaker who had perched astride
on a broken fragment of wall, with her barrel of wine set up on end on
the stones in front of her, and her six soldiers, her gros bebees, as
she was given maternally to calling them, lounging at their ease on the
arid, dusty turf below. She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though
her skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair was cut as
short as a boy's, and her face had not one regular feature in it. But
then--regularity! who wanted it, who would have thought the most
pure classic type a change for the better, with those dark, dancing,
challenging eyes; with that arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny,
so mignon, and those scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never
so handsome as when a cigarette was between them, or sooth to say, not
seldom a short pipe itself?

She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she
was mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if need be, like a
Zouave; she could fire galloping, she could toss off her brandy or her
vermouth like a trooper; she would on occasion clinch her little brown
hand and deal a blow that the recipient would not covet twice; she was
an enfant de Paris and had all its wickedness at her fingers; she would
sing you guinguette songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and
she would dance the cancan at the Salle de Mars, with the biggest
giant of a Cuirassier there. And yet with all that, she was not wholly
unsexed; with all that she had the delicious fragrance of youth, and
had not left a certain feminine grace behind her, though she wore a
vivandiere's uniform, and