herself in her parting snap at Monsieur Mutuel,
and so, placing her right hand on her hip with
a defiant air, as if nothing should ever tempt
her to unsnap that snap, strolled out into the
Place to glance up at the windows of Mr. The
Englishman. That worthy happening to be
looking out of window at the moment, Madame
Bouclet gave him a graceful salutation with
her head, looked to the right and looked to the
left to account to him for her being there,
considered for a moment like one who accounted to
herself for somebody she had expected not being
there, and re-entered her own gateway. Madame
Bouclet let all her house giving on the Place,
in furnished flats or floors, and lived up the yard
behind, in company with Monsieur Bouclet her
husband (great at billiards), an inherited brewing
business, several fowls, two carts, a nephew, a
little dog in a big kennel, a grape-vine, a counting-
house, four horses, a married sister (with a
share in the brewing business), the husband and
two children of the married sister, a parrot, a
drum (performed on by the little boy of the
married sister), two billeted soldiers, a quantity
of pigeons, a fife (played by the nephew in a
ravishing manner), several domestics and
supernumeraries, a perpetual flavour of coffee and
soup, a terrific range of artificial rocks and
wooden precipices at least four feet high, a
small fountain, and half a dozen large
sunflowers.

Now, the Englishman in taking his Appartement
—or, as one might say on our side of the
Channel, his set of chambers—had given his
name, correct to the letter, LANGLEY. But as
he had a British way of not opening his mouth
very wide on foreign soil, except at meals, the
Brewery had been able to make nothing of it
but L' Anglais. So, Mr. The Englishman he
had become and he remained.

"Never saw such a people!" muttered Mr.
The Englishman, as he now looked out of
window. "Never did, in my life!"

This was true enough, for he had never
before been out of his own country—a right
little island, a tight little island, a bright little
island, a show-fight little island, and full of
merit of all sorts; but not the whole round
world.

"These chaps," said Mr. The Englishman to
himself, as his eye rolled over the Place,
sprinkled with military here and there, "are no
more like soldiers——!" Nothing being
sufficiently strong for the end of his sentence, he
left it unended.

This again (from the point of view of his
experience) was strictly correct; for, though there
was a great agglomeration of soldiers in the
town and neighbouring country, you might have
held a grand Review and Field Day of them
every one, and looked in vain among them all
for a soldier choking behind his foolish stock, or
a soldier lamed by his ill-fitting shoes, or a
soldier deprived of the use of his limbs by straps
and buttons, or a soldier elaborately forced to
be self-helpless in all the small affairs of life. A
swarm of brisk bright active bustling handy odd
skirmishing fellows, able to turn to cleverly at
anything, from a siege to soup, from great guns
to needles and thread, from the broad-sword
exercise to slicing an onion, from making war to
making omelettes, was all you would have found.

What a swarm! From the Great Place
under the eye of Mr. The Englishman, where
a few awkward squads from the last conscription
were doing the goose-step—some members
of those squads still as to their bodies in
the chrysalis peasant-state of Blouse, and only
military butterflies as to their regimentally-
clothed legs—from the Great Place, away
outside the fortifications and away for miles along
the dusty roads, soldiers swarmed. All day long,
upon the grass-grown ramparts of the town,
practising soldiers trumpeted and bugled; all
day long, down in angles of dry trenches,
practising soldiers drummed and drummed. Every
forenoon, soldiers burst out of the great barracks
into the sandy gymnasium-ground hard by,
and flew over the wooden horse, and hung on to
flying ropes, and dangled upside-down between
parallel bars, and shot themselves off wooden
platforms, splashes, sparks, coruscations, showers,
of soldiers. At every corner of the town wall,
every guard-house, every gateway, every sentry-
box, every drawbridge, every reedy ditch and
rushy dyke, soldiers soldiers soldiers. And the
town being pretty well all wall, guard-house,
gateway, sentry-box, drawbridge, reedy ditch
and rushy dyke, the town was pretty well all
soldiers.

What would the sleepy old town have been
without the soldiers, seeing that even with
them it had so overslept itself as to have slept
its echoes hoarse, its defensive bars and locks
and bolts and chains all rusty, and its ditches
stagnant! From the days when VAUBAN
engineered it to that perplexing extent that to look
at it was like being knocked on the head with it:
the stranger becoming stunned and stertorous
under the shock of its incomprehensibility—
from the days when VAUBAN made it the express
incorporation of every substantive and adjective
in the art of military engineering, and not only
twisted you into it and twisted you out of it, to
the right, to the left, opposite, under here, over
there, in the dark, in the dirt, by gateway, archway,
covered way, dry way, wet way, fosse,
portcullis, drawbridge, sluice, squat tower, pierced
wall, and heavy battery, but likewise took a
fortifying dive under the neighbouring country, and
came to the surface three or four miles off,
blowing out incomprehensible mounds and
batteries among the quiet crops of chicory and beet-
root—from those days to these, the town had
been asleep, and dust and rust and must had
settled on its drowsy Arsenals and Magazines,
and grass had grown up in its silent streets.

On market-days alone, its Great Place
suddenly leaped out of bed. On market-days, some
friendly enchanter struck his staff upon the
stones of the Great Place, and instantly arose
the liveliest booths and stalls and sittings and
standings, and a pleasant hum of chaffering and
huckstering from many hundreds of tongues, and