remaining spirit in
its tiny insect's belly is burned.

As for me, I've been lucky, and I see Paradis wandering about, his
kindly face to the wind, grumbling and chewing a bit of wood. "Tiens,"
I say to him, "take this."

"A box of matches!" he exclaims amazed, looking at it as one looks at a
jewel. "Egad! That's capital! Matches!"

A moment later we see him lighting his pipe, his face saucily sideways
and splendidly crimsoned by the reflected flame, and everybody shouts,
"Paradis' got some matches!"

Towards evening I meet Paradis near the ruined triangle of a
house-front at the corner of the two streets of this most miserable
among villages.

He beckons to me. "Hist!" He has a curious and rather awkward air.

"I say," he says to me affectionately, but looking at his feet, "a bit
since, you chucked me a box of flamers. Well, you're going to get a bit
of your own back for it. Here!"

He puts something in my hand. "Be careful!" he whispers, "it's fragile!"

Dazzled by the resplendent purity of his present, hardly even daring to
believe my eyes, I see--an egg!

XVI

An Idyll

"REALLY and truly," said Paradis, my neighbor in the ranks, "believe me
or not, I'm knocked out--I've never before been so paid on a march as I
have been with this one, this evening."

His feet were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the burden
of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline seemed almost
fantastic. Twice he tripped and stumbled.

Paradis is tough. But he had been running up and down the trench all
night as liaison man while the others were sleeping, so he had good
reason to be exhausted and to growl "Quoi? These kilometers must be
made of india-rubber, there's no way out of it."

Every three steps he hoisted his knapsack roughly up with a hitch of
his hips, and panted under its dragging; and all the heap that he made
with his bundles tossed and creaked like an overloaded wagon.

"We're there," said a non-com.

Non-coms. always say that, on every occasion. But--in spite of the
non-com.'s declaration--we were really arriving in a twilight village
which seemed to be drawn in white chalk and heavy strokes of black upon
the blue paper of the sky, where the sable silhouette of the church--a
pointed tower flanked by two turrets more slender and more sharp--was
that of a tall cypress.

But the soldier, even when he enters the village where he is to be
quartered, has not reached the end of h