n I thought of how proud these boys felt,
and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the
seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were
longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.

Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
went down the road.

Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from
the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
wide turnpike.

Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses--

_Ave Crux Spes Unica._

I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I
looked backward along the road I had come.

There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the
plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they
stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind
of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even
the high hills.

Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to
the influences that had followed me for so many miles--the solemn
quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of
Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and
pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.

The afternoon and the evening followed as I put one mile after another
behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I would not rest. I left
my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I
plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment
for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the
last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to
a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my
fourth day.

The light still fell,