hom, therefore,
she was as free to reject.

In connection with these Algerian campaigns of the Duc d'Aumale, I had a
story told to me by his brother, De Montpensier, which becomes
particularly interesting nowadays, when spiritualism or spiritism is so
much discussed. He had it from two unimpeachable sources, namely, from
his brother D'Aumale and from General Cousin-Montauban, afterwards Comte
de Palikao, the same who was so terribly afraid, after the expedition in
China, that the emperor would create him Comte de Pekin, and who sent an
aide-de-camp in advance to beg the sovereign not to do so.[43]

[Footnote 43: In order to understand this dread on Montauban's
part, the English reader should be told that the term _pekin_
is the contemptuous nickname for the civilian, with the French
soldier.--EDITOR.]

It was to General Montauban that Abdel-Kader surrendered after the
battles of Isly and Djemma-Gazhouat. It was in the latter engagement
that a Captain de Gereaux fell, and when the news of his death reached
his family they seemed almost prepared for it. It transpired that, on
the very day of the engagement, and at the very hour in which Captain de
Gereaux was struck down, his sister, a young and handsome but very
impressionable girl, started all of a sudden from her chair, exclaiming
that she had seen her brother, surrounded by Arabs, who were felling him
to the ground. Then she dropped to the floor in a dead swoon.

A few years elapsed, when General Montauban, who had become the
military Governor of the province of Oran, received a letter from the De
Gereaux family, requesting him to make some further inquiries respecting
the particulars of the captain's death. The letter was written at the
urgent prayer of Mdlle. de Gereaux, who had never ceased to think and
speak of her brother, and who, on one occasion, a month or so before the
despatch of the petition, had risen again from her chair, though in a
more composed manner than before, insisting that she had once more seen
her brother. This time he was dressed in the native garb, he seemed very
poor, and was delving the soil. These visions recurred at frequent
intervals, to the intense distress of the family, who could not but
ascribe them to the overstrung imagination of Mdlle. de Gereaux. A
little while after, she maintained having seen her brother in a white
robe and turban, and intoning hymns that sounded to her like Arabic. She
i