e is even a boot-jack. Only an old trooper
knows what a boot-jack is worth! There are times, when one is out on a
campaign, sir, when one is ready to burn down a house to come by a knave
of a boot-jack. After a few marches, one on the top of another, or above
all, after an engagement, there are times when a swollen foot and the
soaked leather will not part company, pull as you will; I have had to
lie down in my boots more than once. One can put up with the annoyance
so long as one is by oneself."

The commandant's wink gave a kind of profound slyness to his last
utterance; then he began to make a survey. Not without surprise, he saw
that the room was neatly kept, comfortable, and almost luxurious.

"What splendor!" was his comment. "Your own room must be something
wonderful."

"Come and see," said the doctor; "I am your neighbor, there is nothing
but the staircase between us."

Genestas was again surprised when he entered the doctor's room,
a bare-looking apartment with no adornment on the walls save an
old-fashioned wall-paper of a yellowish tint with a pattern of brown
roses over it; the color had gone in patches here and there. There was
a roughly painted iron bedstead, two gray cotton curtains were suspended
from a wooden bracket above it, and a threadbare strip of carpet lay
at the foot; it was like a bed in a hospital. By the bed-head stood a
rickety cupboard on four feet with a door that continually rattled with
a sound like castanets. Three chairs and a couple of straw-bottomed
armchairs stood about the room, and on a low chest of drawers in walnut
wood stood a basin, and a ewer of obsolete pattern with a lid, which
was kept in place by a leaden rim round the top of the vessel. This
completed the list of the furniture.

The grate was empty. All the apparatus required for shaving lay about in
front of an old mirror suspended above the painted stone chimney-piece
by a bit of string. The floor was clean and carefully swept, but it was
worn and splintered in various places, and there were hollows in it here
and there. Gray cotton curtains bordered with a green fringe adorned the
two windows. The scrupulous cleanliness maintained by Jacquotte gave a
certain air of distinction to this picture of simplicity, but everything
in it, down to the round table littered with stray papers, and the very
pens on the writing-desk, gave the idea of an almost monastic life--a
life so wholly filled with thought and feeling of a