-zim!
The Prussians are playing their Wagner music for us. Here, swallow
this. How do you feel now?"

"Sleepy. Did you say a day or two, doctor?"

"I said a week or two--perhaps longer. I'll look in this evening if
I'm not up to my chin in amputations. Take these every hour if in
pain. Go to sleep, my son."

With a paternal tap on my head, he drew on his scarlet, gold-banded
cap, tightened the check strap, and walked out of the room.
Down-stairs I heard him cursing because his horse had been shot. I
never saw him again.

Dozing feverishly, hearing the cannon through troubled slumber, I
awoke toward noon quite free from any considerable pain, but thirsty
and restless, and numbed to the hips. Alarmed, I strove to move my
feet, and succeeded. Then, freed from the haunting terror of
paralysis, I fell to pinching my legs with satisfaction, my eyes
roving about in search of water.

The room where I lay was in disorder; it appeared to be completely
furnished with well-made old pieces, long out of date, but not old
enough to be desirable. Chairs, sofas, tables were all fashioned in
that poor design which marked the early period of the Consulate; the
mirror was a fine sheet of glass imbedded in Pompeian and Egyptian
designs; the clock, which had stopped, was a meaningless lump of gilt
and marble, supported on gilt sphinxes. Over the bed hung a tarnished
canopy broidered with a coronet, which, from the strawberry leaves and
the pearls raised above them, I took to be the coronet of a count of
English origin.

The room appeared to be very old, and I knew the house must have stood
for centuries somewhere along the single street of Morsbronn, though I
could not remember seeing any building in the village which, judging
from the exterior, seemed likely to contain such a room as this.

The nearer and heavier cannon-shots had ceased, but the window-sashes
hummed with the steady thunder of a battle going on somewhere among
the mountains. Knowing the Alsatian frontier fairly well, I understood
that a battle among the mountains must mean that our First Corps had
been attacked, and that we were on the defensive on French soil.

The booming of the guns was unbroken, as steady and sustained as the
eternal roar of a cataract. At moments I believed that I could
distinguish the staccato crashes of platoon firing, but could not be
certain in the swelling din.

As I lay there on my long, cushioned chair, burning with that
insatiable t