ns that he always shared
willingly with the lowest of his soldiers. It was the grandest trait in
the man's character that he utterly scorned the effeminacy with which
many commanders provided for their table, their comfort, and their
gratification while campaigning, and would commonly neither take himself
nor allow to his officers any more indulgence on the march than his
troopers themselves enjoyed. But his villa on the Sahel was a miniature
palace; it had formerly been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardens
were as enchanting as the interior was--if something florid, still as
elegant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it; for ferocious
as the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved the chase and the
slaughter, he did not disdain, when he had whetted beak and talons
to satiety, to smooth his ruffled plumage in downy nests and under
caressing hands.

To-night the windows of the pretty, low, snow-white, far-stretching
building were lighted and open, and through the wilderness of cactus,
myrtle, orange, citron, fuchsia, and a thousand flowers that almost
buried it under their weight of leaf and blossom, a myriad of lamps were
gleaming like so many glowworms beneath the foliage, while from a cedar
grove, some slight way farther out, the melodies and overtures of the
best military bands in Algiers came mellowed, though not broken, by the
distance and the fall of the bubbling fountains. Cigarette looked and
listened, and her gay, brown face grew duskily warm with wrath.

"Ah, bah!" she muttered as she pressed her pretty lips to the
lattice-work. "The men die like sheep in the hospital, and get sour
bread tossed to them as if they were pigs, and are thrashed if they pawn
their muskets for a stoup of drink when their throats are as dry as the
desert--and you live in clover. Marbleu!"

Cigarette was a resolute little democrat; she had loaded the carbines
behind the barricade in Paris before she was ten years old, and was not
seldom in the perplexity of conflicting creeds when her loyalty to the
tricolor smote with a violent clash on her love for the populace and
their liberty.

She looked a moment longer through the gilded scroll-work; then, as she
had done once before, thrust her pistols well within her sash that
they should not catch upon the boughs, and pushing herself through the
prickly cactus hedge, impervious to anything save herself or a Barbary
marmoset, twisted with marvelous ingenuity through the sh