attle of voluble tongues around him,
and a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash of pebbles, and blocks
in a torrent. Generally the men slouched when they were not running. At
Dieppe he had noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be nimbler
on the legs than ours; and that may count both ways, he consoled a
patriotic vanity by thinking; instantly rebuking the thought; for he
had read chapters of Military History. He sat eyeing the front row of
figures in his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers we
might, heaven designing it, have to face, and how to beat them; until
he gazed on Rouen, knowing by the size of it and by what Mr. Durance had
informed him of the city on the river, that it must be the very city
of Rouen, not so many years back a violated place, at the mercy of a
foreign foe. Strong pity laid hold of Skepsey. He fortified the heights
for defence, but saw at a glance that it was the city for modern
artillery to command, crush and enter. He lost idea of these afflicted
people as foes, merely complaining of their attacks on England, and
their menaces in their Journals and pamphlets; and he renounced certain
views of the country to be marched over on the road by this route to
Paris, for the dictation of terms of peace at the gates of the French
capital, sparing them the shameful entry; and this after the rout of
their attempt at an invasion of the Island!

A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively grey eyes. Skepsey
handed a card from his pocket. The man perused it, and crying: 'Dreux?'
waved out of the carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen
as not the place, not at all, totally other. Thus we are taught, that
a foreign General, ignorant of the language, must confine himself to
defensive operations at home; he would be a child in the hands of the
commonest man he meets. Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew
from his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our
necessities on a line of march. The roads to Great Britain's metropolis,
and the supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on
London, are marked in the military offices of these people; and that,
with their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a
belligerent return for it. Only we pray to be let live peacefully.

Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total stranger to us,
conducts an ignorant foreigner from one station to another through the
streets of