been burnt to the ground, or shattered by
bomb-shells, and nothing remains within
the huge earthworks of Metz but charred
beams and crumbling brickwork, and dust
and ashes. Perhaps the head- waiters at the
two caravansaries—I have heard that a
fierce mutual hatred existed between them
—have eaten one another.

Let me strive to embody some fleeting
memories of that demented time. There
is breakfast. We that were English in
Metz, a feeble folk, continuously snubbed
by the military authorities, and harassed
by the police, and pursuing an arduous
vocation under all manner of slights,
discouragement, and obstacles, usually made
a rendezvous to breakfast together at the
same time—about half-past ten. There
was canny Mr. M'Inkhorn, from the Land
o' Cakes, special correspondent of The
Bannockburn Journal and Peck o' Maut
Advertiser, who, in the performance of his
duties as a war-scribe, was chronically
perturbed in mind by the thought that he had
left unfinished in North Britain a series of
statistical articles on the Sanitary Condition
of Glen M'Whisky. There was Mr. Mercutio,
once gallant and gay, now elderly and
portly, who was called Philosopher
Mercutio in early life, and wrote that
celebrated work on the Rationale of the
Categorical Imperative as correlative to the
Everlasting Affirmation of Negation, and
who now laughed, and gossiped, and drank
kirschwasser all day long, and wrote
war-letters to a High Tory evening paper all
night. He had brought his son with him,
an ingenuous youth, in a grey tweed suit,
who was his sire's guide, philosopher, and
friend; controlled him gently in the matter
of kirschwasser, was the profoundest cynic
and the shrewdest observer for his age I
ever met with, and who otherwise, from
sunrise to sunset, did nothing with an
assiduity which was perfectly astonishing.
There was mild-eyed Mr. Sumph, of
Balliol, who indited those fiery letters
from Abyssinia during the campaign, and
had a special faculty while in Metz for
getting arrested as a Prussian spy. There
were a brace of quiet, harmless, industrious
artists belonging to English illustrated
newspapers, pilgrims of the pencil, who
had wandered, in discharge of their
functions, to the Crimea, to Italy, to India, to
China, to the Isthmus of Suez, and to the
banks of the Chickahominy, and who were
now, in fear and trembling, making notes
in their sketch-books of the most salient
madnesses of Metz susceptible of pictorial
treatment. And especially there was Mr.
O'Goggerdan, of the Avalanche, a small
man, but of a most heroic stomach, and of
venturesomeness astounding. He had been,
they said, a colonel of American Federal
cavalry, a Confederate bushwhacker, a
Mexican guerillero, a Spanish contrabandista,
a Garibaldino, one of the Milia di
Marsala of course, a Fenian centre, and a
Pontifical Zouave. He was Dugald Dalgetty
combined with Luca Fa Presto; doubling
the rapier of the practised swordsman with
the pen of the ready- writer. A wind blowing
from Fleet-street, London, had brought
these strangely-assorted people together:
the philosopher, the elder, the Oxford fellow,
the painter, the soldier of fortune, were
all bent on achieving the same task, and
were all occasionally partakers of that
misery which makes us acquainted with
such very strange bedfellows.

When the customary salutations of the
morning were over, when we had inquired
whether any of our number had been
arrested as spies during the preceding evening,
and when we had striven to ascertain
whether there were any news from the
front—it was just after Saarbrück— and
when we had, as usual, been baffled in
our attempt, we fell to discussing a very
substantial breakfast à la fourchette, to
which dropped in, between eleven and
noon, group after group of artists in the
great drama, of which the first scene had,
as yet, been but ill played. It is possible
that I may be rather understating
than overstating the fact, when I assume
that three-fourths of the French people we
used to meet every morning at breakfast,
and who, as a rule, treated us with infinite
scorn and contumely—it is true that as
civilian cads we had no business there, and
should have been hiding our heads in
squalid auberges suited to our degree—are
by this time dead and buried, or scattered
to the four winds of heaven; in exile, in
captivity, or in other ruinous and irremediable
dispersion. Of the mere bald aspects
and trite humours of a French garrison
town, with which most of us who have
made even a week's trip to the Continent
must be familiar, I should be ashamed to
treat; and Metz in ordinary times had
been, I doubt it not, as dull and trite a
place as its hundred and one congeners
among French garrisons. A great deal of
drumming and a great deal of bugling;
much swaggering about streets and leering
under feminine bonnets on the part of
portly captains and wasp- waisted