th an interesting topic.

During supper an orderly of the escort showed himself into the
dining-room and asked permission to speak to the colonel.

"What is it, Barbour?" said that officer pleasantly, having overheard
the request.

"Colonel, there is something wrong in the cellar; I don't know what--
somebody there. I was down there rummaging about."

"I will go down and see," said a staff officer, rising.

"So will I," the colonel said; "let the others remain. Lead on,
orderly."

They took a candle from the table and descended the cellar stairs, the
orderly in visible trepidation. The candle made but a feeble light, but
presently, as they advanced, its narrow circle of illumination revealed
a human figure seated on the ground against the black stone wall which
they were skirting, its knees elevated, its head bowed sharply forward.
The face, which should have been seen in profile, was invisible, for the
man was bent so far forward that his long hair concealed it; and,
strange to relate, the beard, of a much darker hue, fell in a great
tangled mass and lay along the ground at his side. They involuntarily
paused; then the colonel, taking the candle from the orderly's shaking
hand, approached the man and attentively considered him. The long dark
beard was the hair of a woman--dead. The dead woman clasped in her arms
a dead babe. Both were clasped in the arms of the man, pressed against
his breast, against his lips. There was blood in the hair of the woman;
there was blood in the hair of the man. A yard away, near an irregular
depression in the beaten earth which formed the cellar's floor--fresh
excavation with a convex bit of iron, having jagged edges, visible in
one of the sides--lay an infant's foot. The colonel held the light as
high as he could. The floor of the room above was broken through, the
splinters pointing at all angles downward. "This casemate is not
bomb-proof," said the colonel gravely. It did not occur to him that his
summing up of the matter had any levity in it.

They stood about the group awhile in silence; the staff officer was
thinking of his unfinished supper, the orderly of what might possibly be
in one of the casks on the other side of the cellar. Suddenly the man
whom they had thought dead raised his head and gazed tranquilly into
their faces. His complexion was coal black; the cheeks were apparently
tattooed in irregular sinuous lines from the eyes downward. The lips,
too, were white, lik