dears. If I were
to leave them alone here for a moment, they would stuff themselves with
them."

"You are very fond of them?"

The old woman raised her head at this, and looked at him with gentle
malice in her eyes.

"Fond of them!" she said. "I have had to part with three of them
already. I only have the care of them until they are six years old," she
went on with a sigh.

"But where are your own children?"

"I have lost them."

"How old are you?" Genestas asked, to efface the impression left by his
last question.

"I am thirty-eight years old, sir. It will be two years come next St.
John's Day since my husband died."

She finished dressing the poor sickly mite, who seemed to thank her by a
loving look in his faded eyes.

"What a life of toil and self-denial!" thought the cavalry officer.

Beneath a roof worthy of the stable wherein Jesus Christ was born,
the hardest duties of motherhood were fulfilled cheerfully and without
consciousness of merit. What hearts were these that lay so deeply buried
in neglect and obscurity! What wealth, and what poverty! Soldiers,
better than other men, can appreciate the element of grandeur to be
found in heroism in sabots, in the Evangel clad in rags. The Book may be
found elsewhere, adorned, embellished, tricked out in silk and satin
and brocade, but here, of a surety, dwelt the spirit of the Book. It was
impossible to doubt that Heaven had some holy purpose underlying it all,
at the sight of the woman who had taken a mother's lot upon herself, as
Jesus Christ had taken the form of a man, who gleaned and suffered and
ran into debt for her little waifs; a woman who defrauded herself in
her reckonings, and would not own that she was ruining herself that she
might be a Mother. One was constrained to admit, at the sight of her,
that the good upon earth have something in common with the angels in
heaven; Commandant Genestas shook his head as he looked at her.

"Is M. Benassis a clever doctor?" he asked at last.

"I do not know, sir, but he cures poor people for nothing."

"It seems to me that this is a man and no mistake!" he went on, speaking
to himself.

"Oh! yes, sir, and a good man too! There is scarcely any one hereabouts
that does not put his name in their prayers, morning and night!"

"That is for you, mother," said the soldier, as he gave her several
coins, "and that is for the children," he went on, as he added another
crown. "Is M. Benassis' house still a lon