to look in a pocketbook which was in her bosom, and in it I saw
two photographs of quite young children, a boy and a girl, with those
kind, gentle, chubby faces that German children have. In it there were
also two locks of light hair and a letter in a large, childish hand, and
beginning with German words which meant:

"'My dear little mother.

"'I could not restrain my tears, my dear friend, and so I untied her,
and without venturing to look at the face of my poor dead husband, who
was not to be avenged, I went with her as far as the inn. She is free; I
have just left her, and she kissed me with tears. I am going upstairs
to my husband; come as soon as possible, my dear friend, to look for our
two bodies.'"

I set off with all speed, and when I arrived there was a Prussian patrol
at the cottage; and when I asked what it all meant, I was told that
there was a captain of francs-tireurs and his wife inside, both dead. I
gave their names; they saw that I knew them, and I begged to be allowed
to arrange their funeral.

"Somebody has already undertaken it," was the reply. "Go in if you wish
to, as you know them. You can settle about their funeral with their
friend."

I went in. The captain and his wife were lying side by side on a bed,
and were covered by a sheet. I raised it, and saw that the woman had
inflicted a similar wound in her throat to that from which her husband
had died.

At the side of the bed there sat, watching and weeping, the woman who
had been mentioned to me as their best friend. It was the lancer's wife.

THE PRISONERS

There was not a sound in the forest save the indistinct, fluttering
sound of the snow falling on the trees. It had been snowing since noon;
a little fine snow, that covered the branches as with frozen moss,
and spread a silvery covering over the dead leaves in the ditches, and
covered the roads with a white, yielding carpet, and made still more
intense the boundless silence of this ocean of trees.

Before the door of the forester's dwelling a young woman, her arms bare
to the elbow, was chopping wood with a hatchet on a block of stone. She
was tall, slender, strong-a true girl of the woods, daughter and wife of
a forester.

A voice called from within the house:

"We are alone to-night, Berthine; you must come in. It is getting dark,
and there may be Prussians or wolves about."

"I've just finished, mother," replied the young woman, splitting as she
spoke an immense log