The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

XXXI

"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red Prince—as people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in virtue of his partiality for the crimson uniform of his regiment, the Ziethen Hussars,—have departed amidst scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to take over the respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps. On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which I pen these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open landau drawn by two superb black Hungarian horses to join his Ministers and his Chief of the Great Staff at the station, where waited the special train destined to convey the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field Armies of Germany to the immediate Seat of War."

There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the writer's skull came smartly into contact with the uncushioned seat-back of the gray-painted, semi-partitioned railway transport-car, in which, with some forty blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard, P. C. Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in a din so comprehensive that you could only make your neighbor hear by putting your mouth to his ear and bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with dust and smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness, that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it with sensible effort.

The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began where the glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the eighth of a company appropriated to themselves the corner-seats. Sandwiched between two large and heated warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee, and his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs, P. C. Breagh abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and continued to write, using the old straw hat which crowned the knapsack as a support for a notebook.

"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring under the influence of emotion, accompanied His Majesty. A thunderstorm coruscated and detonated overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed out, and King Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of enthusiastic 'Hoch's.' The object of their acclamations kept continually smoothing his heavy white mustache with the right, ungloved hand, between the salutes with which he acknowledged the plaudits of his people—a characteristic gesture of the veteran monarch when..."

The pencil faltered. "Under the influence of emotion" could not be used again, because it had already done duty for the Queen, whose eyes, poor lady! had been red with crying. P. C. Breagh knocked off to sharpen his pencil and read over what he had set down. "Coruscated and detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a good deal nearer the mark. And "characteristic gesture" was loftier language than "familiar trick" or "habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at it, it was true, but this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for letters, "describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and smelled."

Still, one could not hope to please everybody—and this was a descriptive article—not a chatty news-letter. When complete, it would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading Daily, with the brief intimation that more like it might be had—at a price. That it would draw commissions, P. C. Breagh believed implicitly. There was a stately stodginess about the style that could not fail to impress. So he continued as "Die Wacht am Rhein" broke out once more; and the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand neighbor tickled his ribs and made him goosefleshy.

"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."

"Ach, ach! but the old man looks tired!" people in the front had holloaed to one another. All the week-end one had seen the King bowling up, and down, and round-about Berlin in his little one-horse carriage, with a single, mounted orderly-officer in attendance; giving out colors, addressing the regiments, conversing in short, soldierly sentences with the field-officers in command.

"Baron von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff," went on the pencil, "the War-Minister General von Roon, and the Federal Chancellor and Minister-President General Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, with the personnel of the Great Headquarters Staff and the mobilized Foreign Office, received His Majesty at the railway-station, tastefully adorned with black-and-white bunting, carpeted with red, and garlanded with roses, said to be the favorite floral emblem of the septuagenarian potentate...."

It could not be denied by P. C. Breagh,—the painfully hammered-out paragraphs smacked of the sample supplied by Mr. Knewbit for avoidance. "Sham technicality and sentimental slumgullion," he seemed to hear that rigorous critic saying, so loudly and in such a pouncing manner, that P. C. Breagh hurriedly scratched out the sentence about the floral emblems, though "septuagenarian potentate" must be reserved for use later, as offering a refreshing change from "aged King" and "veteran" or "venerable monarch." "Hoary-headed Ruler" would come in usefully by-and-by....

Bump—bump—jolt, ker-link-ker-lank ker-lunk! ...

The two powerful engines, pulling a train-load of fully two-thirds of a regiment at fullest war-strength, were slowing up at a station: ... A roar of voices kept continually at crescendo hailed the arrival. Another roar, mixed with fragments of patriotic song, replied. The platform presented a sea of heads of both sexes, backed by an imposing array of shelves, decorated with foliage, dangling lamps and national bunting; surmounted by a bust of the King between busts of Moltke and Bismarck, and literally groaning under piles of sausages, loaves, cheeses, oleaginous packages of sandwiches and pastry—rows of gilt and silver-foiled wine-bottles, and then more rows....

Barrels of genuine Berlin beer, adorned with the Hohenzollern colors, stood hospitably ready to replenish glasses and mugs. Filled with the amber nectar, trays of these, suspended from the shoulders of stalwart youths, wearing Red Cross arm-badges, and white-muslin-draped maidens adorned with crimson sashes, waited to quench the thirst of Prussia's soldier sons. And taking in the condition of things at a glance, said one of the two N.C.O.'s in charge of the party:

"Himmeldonnerwetter! ... Lads, there seems no help for it. We have got to tuck in again!"

And simultaneously with the bass response: "At your service, Herr Sergeant!" and almost before the slow-going locomotives stopped, panting Samaritans hurled themselves upon the carriages, and arms ending in hands proffering packages of comestibles and tobacco, bottles of beer or frothing glasses, or packets of cigars, were thrust in between the window-bars, until every man's jaws were busy, and every man's hands were laden.... Until even the modestly retiring P. C. Breagh had been compelled to accept a mighty hunk of iced plum-cake and a giant package of liver-sandwiches, and forced to empty a foaming beaker of brown Bavarian.

"Why not, why not, when they have plenty for everyone?" hiccoughed a stalwart private, who had emptied many mugs: "Won't every fellow of the regiment find his double-pint waiting him, when the next train comes up?"

There was plenty for everyone. Not only the troop-train that would follow this, containing the odd thousand rank-and-file and the rest of the regimental officers, would find the "cool blonde" and the "dark brunette," the savory snack and the soothing weed, as ready for the alleviation of possible requirements as they had been at every halting-place—the City of Hanover severely excepted—since the huge send-off at Berlin on the afternoon of the previous day.

Every class contributed to the refreshment of the soldiers. Wealthy brewers sent drayloads of barrels, rich aristocrats gave wines from their cellars. The bakers bestowed bread, the pork-butchers contributed hams and sausages, the tobacconists cigars and pipe-tobacco. While the cook baked cakes with her perquisites of lard and dripping: and the servant-maid took from her scant savings for the purchase of a gross of match-boxes, to distribute at the station when the military trains came in.

Poor was the wight who could be liberal in nothing. And thus thought the little old woman when she cooked her dozen ginger-snaps.

She was a tiny little monkey-faced old peasant, in a frilled white mutch, jaded red shawl, blue apron and brown-striped drugget petticoat; and she stood quite alone in a clear space left upon the platform of a little country station, as the eager philanthropists about her crowded to lavish hospitality on the inmates of the incoming train. As the pastry and the cakes, the coffee, beer, and spirits flowed in at the windows and down the throats of the wearers of the blue, white-faced Guard uniforms, this little old woman made no effort to offer her ginger-snaps, which were ranged in three rows of four on a dingy white cloth in a little broken basket, and were palpably melting under the rays of an ardent July sun.

Her timidity and her feebleness had kept her back, but when the Colonel in command issued the order to entrain, and the officers who had clanked in pairs up and down the platform, good-humoredly answering the questions of old ladies, and gallantly returning the admiring glances of young ones, accepting a leaf-full of fruit here, or a glass of Rhine wine or a cigarette there,—began to take their places,—she mustered courage to hold up her basket to a dandy young subaltern and murmur: "Please to take!"

Next moment—the dandy could not have meant it,—but as he pushed away the extended basket, and swung round upon his heel, his silver sword-knot caught in the frayed cloth or broken wicker-work, and down went the basket, and the snaps were spilt upon the ground....

"Thou dear God!" the little old woman cried in anguish. "Ach—ach! the good, the delicious ginger-snaps! ... Who now will eat them? Ach!—Ach!"

And up to her poor eyes went her blue apron. It was a terrible tragedy to her. Some people pitied her. Others were heartless enough to laugh after the fashion of the blond, red-lipped officer—and to laugh once more at the summary fashion of his setting-down.

For a terrible, rasping voice said, speaking behind the dandy subaltern, and full four inches above the level of his ear:

"Under-Lieutenant Fahle will remedy the damage done by his carelessness before he resumes his place in the train!"

Thus the train waited while the offender, blood-red with rage and confusion, picked up the sticky brown cakes with his snowily gloved fingers, and replaced them in the broken basket, amidst the little old woman's humble apologies, and entreaties that the gracious gentleman would not trouble himself. When the Colonel, owner of the rasping voice above referred to, in conjunction with a bushy scarlet beard and bristling mustaches, a stately height of six feet four inches, a regulation waist, and three rows of decorations, performed an act of bravery for which he deserved another medal still. For, selecting the snap that looked cleanest, this dauntless warrior gravely took it between his thumb and finger, bit a piece out, and declared it excellent. Then, amidst the rapturous plaudits of the onlookers, he solemnly saluted the twittering old lady, and swung himself loftily back into his carriage, thundering out once more the order:

"Entrain!"

Conceive the banging of doors, the bumping and clanking, the cheers and the tears da capo, and the curtseys the little old woman dropped, one after another, almost faster than one could count. Suppose the train moving slowly on, and a tricksy spirit inspiring a wag among the rank-and-file aboard, to shout to her:

"Hey there, Mother Ginger-snaps! give us one before we go!"

Twenty voices took up the cry, and blue cloth-covered arms were thrust out between the carriage window-bars. Hands waggled, soliciting the sugary boon. And the little old woman, torn between the desire to give and the impossibility of giving,—danced like a hen on a hot griddle, until a giant porter, compassionating her plight, snatched her up like a large doll, and ran with her beside the moving carriages, holding her out at arm's length, as she upheld her basket, until all the ginger-snaps were gone.

Instinctively as P. C. Breagh had felt that the cumbrous grandiloquence of his descriptive article would be snorted at by Mr. Knewbit, so he knew that the little incident of the ginger-snaps would afford his patron delight. Therefore he tucked it away in a safe pigeon-hole of his memory, with a description of the rough, gay-painted, crowded wooden box he sat in, odoriferous with its conglomeration of smells, based on the combined stenches of tallow and perspiring humanity, laced with the sharp sour of malt, and mercifully tempered with the fumes of strong tobacco.

Piff! The hot, cinder-flavored draughts that raced in over the glazed half-windows were powerless to freshen or dilute the atmosphere. Yet among the varied types of men who, their heavy knapsacks disposed in iron racks above them, sat packed as close as sardines on the narrow benches, were not a few, who, judging by the mute evidence of their well-groomed skins and carefully kept finger-nails, their finer hair and more clearly modeled features, belonged to Germany's upper class.

Shriek! The train plunged into a cutting ending in a tunnel of sheer blackness. Bursting, with another shriek, into the light of day, she raced for a while neck-and-neck with a cavalry-train. They were Red Dragoon Guards and White Cuirassiers of the Great Headquarters Staff, and they exchanged cheers and sharp, staccato shouts of "Hurrah, Preussen!" with the infantry of the Guard, as the latter were hurried by.

Nothing was left to Chance. All was deadly, methodical accuracy. The keen, clear brain under Moltke's wig controlled the speed of every train upon the six Rhine and Moselle railways over which the Army of United Germany was rolling to inundate France.

Trains, trains, trains!

Trains of trucks, laden with gabions woven of split beech-saplings, with oaken lascines and bales of empty earth-bags. Commissariat trains of wagons packed with sheep and cattle, and the ubiquitous pig of the Fatherland. Coffee-and-sugar trains, trains of pea-sausage and the rock-hard brown biscuit wherewith "Our Moltke" fed his soldier men. Trains of spare arms, clothing, trenching-tools and cooking-utensils; trains of cartridges, gunpowder, blasting-powder, solid shot, shrapnel, and the big projectiles destined for the siege-guns; with trains upon trains close-packed with the men who were to use these things,—took precedence or gave it, because the withered finger beckoned or waved....

"Our Moltke," so mild and affable and courteous, truly, when the Genius that possessed thee spread his steely wings and soared, thou wert a very terrible old man, or so it seems to me.

The descriptive article laid by, you found P. C. Breagh, in the interests of Mr. Knewbit, studying his fellow-travelers. The weak-eyed, spectacled young soldier on his left-hand, whose fingers were burned and yellow-stained, as though their owner had dabbled in chemical experiments, and who had remained mute as a fish throughout the journey, only opening his mouth to eat or drink, or reply to a remark addressed to him by a non-commissioned officer, was reading the "Iliad" of Homer in the original, from a little parchment-bound, Amsterdam-printed Elzevir edition, that he seemed to cherish as the apple of one of his short-sighted eyes.... A handsome young bugler in the next compartment had a well-thumbed copy of "The Pickwick Papers." The huge tanned Guardsman on his right, whose broad breast displayed the medals of 1866 and of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, and whose powerful bass notes had reverberated through the diaphragm of his neighbor when he sang, was chatting with a younger comrade who sat opposite. Holding the well-greased unburnished needle-gun between their solid thighs—to hang the silver-spiked Guard's helmet on the muzzle seemed a popular way of disposing of the headpiece—they exchanged experiences in a genial roar, subdued to a growl at confidential passages.

"Grete came to the Barracks to bid me God-speed.... There were a few tears—dried when I promised to bring her a wedding-gift from Paris. Thou seest, she is going to turn over a new leaf, and get married to a waiter at a Sommer-garten—a club-footed man who is not called upon to serve—being on the Exempt List."

They guffawed at the picture of the happy bridegroom. Said the senior, wiping his overflowing eyes with a hand as brown and broad as an undersized flitch of bacon:

"I looked up 'Mina in the Landsberger-Strasse. She could not meet me, as her old woman had a betrothal-party for one of her daughters. A young student from a Conservatoire, in a tail-coat three sizes too small for him, and a pair of linen cuffs as big as starched table-napkins, was the victim served up. I saw him as 'Mina carried in the spiced wine and rum-punch, and a longer pair of lantern-jaws I never saw. But when they sat down to table, and I took another peep through the door-crack, I promise you those jaws of his were grinding away like steam!"

"Nu, but the punch?" asked the other Guardsman.

"Sapperlot!—do you suppose I went without my whack of it?—and 'Mina's eyes as red as preserved cherries with crying about my going to the War? I had had a mug of the good stuff, and a bottle of something or other!—gilt paper on the neck of it—nothing at all but fizzle inside. Then I settled down to a jug of cool beer and the breast of a turkey, while 'Mina was waiting on the parlor-folks. Heard her step coming along the passage—thought I'd play the fool with her a bit—so I turned the kitchen-gas low and hid behind the door. In she comes!—I'd got my arms round her and kissed her—a regular juicy smack or two, before—by the yell she gave!—I knew it wasn't 'Mina at all...."

"Potzblitz! who was it, then?"

"Who but the old woman? But for the thumping size of the waist I'd squeezed, and the taste of violet-powder in my mouth, I might have thought I'd got hold of one of the young Fräuleins. 'Help, murder, thieves!' cried she. 'How dare you insult a respectable mother of a family! Give your name, you rogue, or I'll have in the police!'—'Don't do that,' says I. 'I'm only 'Mina's brother—dropped in to take leave before going to the War!'—'A fine brother!' says she. 'Do brothers hug their sisters in that bearish way? Be off with you quick march! and think yourself lucky to escape so easily!'..." He wound up: "But if she had reported me to the Herr Oberst Leutnant, nothing much would have come of it. He'd have said: 'Was sol Ich!—but we're off to the War!'"

A sentence or so more, and the conversation resolved itself into strong tobacco-smoke. Twilight was fading into dusk. Dortmund—Elberfeld—Düsseldorf had paid tribute of beers, cheers, and tears to the defenders of German Unity, the most inveterate songsters and conversationalists were getting sleepy, and it would be midnight before the troop-train, traveling, like the others that followed it, at a speed strictly calculated to permit of the somewhat slower transit of six supplementary trains bearing the King and his Great Headquarter Staff—could reach Cologne.

The lamps, adding the flavor of hot kerosene to the conglomeration of odors—had been lighted at Düsseldorf. The tobacco-reek had grown so dense that below their band of yellow light was a sharply defined band of opaque blue fog, in which medium colors were neutralized to monochrome, and outlines of sleeping, or chatting, or card-playing, or reading soldiers blurred into vagueness, wavered, and were blotted out for P. C. Breagh in a sudden doze.

He wakened at a late hour, to the iron measure clanked and ground and beaten out by couplings and brakes, wheels and axles. Snores of all kinds—from the shrill clarionet-note of the spectacled student of Homer to the deep 'cello-bass of the Guardsman who had hugged 'Mina's mistress in mistake for his sweetheart—resounded on all sides; the tobacco-fog had somewhat thinned.

Finding it possible to move, because his burly neighbor was soundly sleeping, pillowed upon the body of the man upon his right hand, P. C. Breagh yawned—recovered his knapsack, which had slipped from his knees to a floor which in point of cleanliness left much to be desired, removed from it with a fragment of newspaper the worst impurities it had contracted by contact, threw the newspaper out of the nearest window and, in the performance of this act, caught a not unfriendly eye.

Its owner, a huge young man, who, occupying a place on the end of the same seat, had been hitherto screened by the body of the huger private who had kissed not wisely, said, and in English of the Oxford brand:

"You find our men lacking in good manners? Yet there is much spitting on the part of English soldiers, when they are standing at ease, or off duty. I have myself observed this."

"Then you know England?" P. C. Breagh interrogated, and the private, who was very tall, very blond, very broad-shouldered, straight-featured, blue-eyed, and small-waisted, answered:

"Pretty well. I have a relative who married a lady who is your countrywoman. I have been the guest of her family at their London house. You speak our language, for I have heard you. And with a North Prussian accent, by the way."

P. C. Breagh returned:

"I spent three years at Schwärz-Brettingen. With the sole result that I can make myself understood by Germans who don't speak English. And that I owe to my landlady."

Said the Guardsman, yawning and smiling:

"My father sent me to Oxford. Three terms have yielded this result,—that I can converse with Englishmen who know German. Thanks to a charming young lady, a niece of the relative I spoke of just now, who was so good as to read the poems of Tennyson with me. 'The Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' and 'Maud,' were her chief favorites—I preferred his epics founded on the Arthurian legend. Though my charming English cousin was often vexed with me for saying that our Wagner's verse-drama of the Nibelungen-Ring possessed far truer inspiration, and that 'Die Walküre' and 'Tristan' would have been finer than anything Tennyson has ever written,—had they existed simply as poems, and never been wedded to music at all. At that the young English lady was angry; she said things to me in her indignation which were terrible; but she forgave me, because I was compelled to leave the University and return to Germany to put in my term of service as a private, before I present myself as a candidate for an officer's silver sword-knot in the usual course of things. You are, perhaps, acquainted with our German methods of qualifying for a Commission? Bismarck has two sons serving as troopers with the 1st Dragoon Guards; whereas a private of Ours is a nephew of Moltke's, and two or three others are cadets of princely families—representatives of what your countrymen would call the 'aristocracy of Germany.' Perhaps one or two of them will find that silver sword-knot they are looking for—across the frontier, somewhere between the Rhine and the Moselle!..."

"When do you think there will be fighting?"

Inexpressibly P. C. Breagh yearned to know when and where the dance was expected to begin. But his eagerness seemed to freeze the loquacious Guardsman, whose blue eyes narrowed, whose smile stiffened, whose smooth voice instantly diverted the current of the talk to other things:

"Were you at the Gala Performance at the Opera, the night before last? Delphine Zucca could hardly sing; her husband, young Baron von Bladen, of the Jastrow Hussars, has been appointed first galloper on the Staff of General Manteuffel, Chief of the First Corps, First Army. So the Zucca is naturally inconsolable, as they've only been married a month. But Elise Hahn-Tieck, as the Genius of United Germany, in a corslet of gilt chain-mail, and a helmet crested with oak-boughs, with a green Rhine meandering over her white muslin robe, was tremendous when she came down to the center of the stage to sing 'Die Wacht am Rhein,'—-carrying our East Prussian Flag and the banner of the Hohenzollern, and followed by other operatic actresses in character as the Auxiliary States. Sapperlot! When she drew her sword, she was tremendous! And when she fell upon her knees, the big chandelier in the auditorium jumped. She sang the part of Gretchen last season, and looked not much over thirty. Make-up, because, you know, she has a grandson who is a junior-lieutenant in the Duke of Coburg's Regiment of White Cuirassiers, and must be sixty if she's a day. Prime donne are like wines, no good till they've arrived at a ripe old age. Though I could introduce you to a little girl of eighteen or so, just now doing a song-and-dance at the Schützen-Strasse Tingel-Tangel, who has a voice that pleases me better than the warblings of any of the highly paid Opera House nightingales. And what a figure! round and tempting and seductive. And such arms, and—Sapperlot!—what a pair of legs!"

Thus prattled the twenty-year-old sprig of German aristocracy, to the other youngster, his senior in years if his junior in knowledge of the world. He went on in his Oxford English:

"Not that I'm inclined to ruin myself for women, though I must say a good many pretty ones have been uncommonly kind to me. That sort of thing runs in my family, though! and I ought to be obliged to my Cousin Max for dying a bachelor. Killed himself in '66 about a mistress who was playing the double game. A regular French adventuress, diabolically handsome, who eloped with him when he was attaché of our Prussian Embassy at Paris in '57, and has a husband living, they say. Colossal impudence—actually passes herself off as my cousin's widow, in society of a certain sort. So, out of the desire to deal Madame Venus a slap in the face, I got a comrade who knew her, to introduce me at a festive supper-party.... Said he: 'Countess von Schön-Valverden, permit me to present my most intimate friend,' and reels off my name. Would you believe it, the woman never turned a hair. It was I who got flustered when she stared me in the face. Colossal coolness—I can hear her now, lisping: 'The Herr Count is doubtless a relative of my poor, dear Maximilian! Even had he not borne the name, I should have been struck by his resemblance to my beloved lost one.' And then I got out, not half as cleverly as I had planned it: 'And even had you borne the name that is your own, Madame, I should have been shot through the heart by the beauty that has already proved fatal to one member of my family!'" He added, "I laid an emphasis on those four words, 'shot through the heart,' because my unlucky cousin actually met his death after that fashion.... Will you have a cigar of mine? They are better than the weeds our patriotic friends have bestowed on us."

P. C. Breagh accepted a smooth light-hued Havana from the offered case, asking with interest, due to the lurid flare of tragedy in the background of the other's lively chatter: "And the lady of the Venusberg—how did she take your reference to her past?"

The Guardsman, cigar in mouth, stopped in the act of striking a fusee-match to answer: "She took it—as a woman of Madame de Bayard's stamp might be expected to. With a sangfroid that one could only admire somewhat less than her superb skin and hair, her shape of a goddess and her marvelous eyes—almost the color of Brazilian tourmaline." He sent out a spiral of fragrant brownish-blue smoke and added: "Had I actually stood four years ago in the shoes which I have legally inherited, I'll be hanged if I'd have shot myself and left her to my rival. For the other was at Schönfeld—actually in the house, you must know!—when Cousin Max came home on leave. Hence the tragedy at three o'clock in the morning. Such a depressing hour to commit suicide. Now, had it been after supper..."

He shrugged, and sent out another spiral of cigar-smoke, and, perceiving that his whilom listener heard no longer, ceased to talk.

The while P. C. Breagh plunged into a brown-study by the chance utterance of a stranger's name, and unblushingly abandoning the effort to remain true to his gigantic type-ideal, hung fondly over the mentally evoked image of an Infanta in miniature.

Where was Juliette de Bayard now? Had the outbreak of war hastened or delayed her marriage with the happy master of swordsmanship? And—worshiping her father as Monica had said she did—how had she borne the parting from him?

She would be very calm.... P. C. Breagh pictured the little face drawn and pinched with misery; saw the sapphire eyes dimmed with tears unshed, imagined the slender throat convulsed with sobs that were kept resolutely back, heard the silver-flute voice saying:

"My father has honored me with his confidence as long as I can remember, sir!" and, "See you—I will be trusted absolutely, or I will not be trusted at all!"

Strange that his elfin queen—his carved ivory Princess—should bear the same name as the woman the Guardsman had gossiped of—the beautiful, evil creature with the eyes like Brazilian tourmalines. And, what particular color in Brazilian tourmalines might have been intended? Some were purple, others pink, and yet others reddish-brown. The woman who had dropped her parasol on the staircase at the Chancellor's had had eyes of tawny wine-color. With the remembrance, came back the perfume shaken from her rustling silks and laces, and the languid echo of her caressing voice.

Drowsiness came next, and then oblivion, in heavy slumber. And, as the unconscious form of P. C. Breagh lapsed this way and that, and his chin burrowed deeper into his bosom, the Sergeant who occupied the corner-seat facing the sleeper,—shading his eyes from the lamplight with a broad brown hand that wore a thick silver wedding ring upon the little finger, lowered the hand, and, leaning forward, stared in the young man's unconscious face, with small, suspicious, unwinking eyes. Now the eyes looked round so sharply, that every waking man in the compartment, save the blue-eyed patron of the Tingel-Tangel girl, found it necessary to assume the appearance of slumber, and the Sergeant's voice said hoarsely:

"Private von Valverden!"

"At your service, Herr Sergeant."

"Private von Valverden, is this one, then, an Englishman?"

"Undoubtedly, Herr Sergeant!"

"Gut!" said the Sergeant. "But what is his calling? Is he of the newspaper-offices that he sits and scribbles so?"

"That question I cannot answer, Herr Sergeant, but if he be on the staff of any paper, he cannot accompany us without a Legitimation, and a letter from someone in authority."

The Sergeant sucked in his bearded lips, and rolled his sharp little eyes more suspiciously than ever. Valverden went on:

"Doubtless he has them—I saw him show a paper to the Halt Commandant at Berlin, and the Herr Colonel himself spoke to him and told him he might travel as far as Bingen by this train. And I happen to know that four London newspaper correspondents have been accredited by the King upon the instance of Count Bismarck; one being appointed to accompany the Crown Prince, another being permitted to accompany the Second Army, while two are attached to the Great Headquarter Staff."

The Sergeant said, glancing at the unconscious slumberer:

"Gut, gut! but is this fellow one of them?"

"If he be not, Herr Sergeant, he will get no farther than Bingen, for doubtless the Commandant there will be on the lookout for persons whose credentials are not of the best."

The Sergeant shook his head vigorously, wrinkling up his full-bearded countenance suspiciously:

"And suppose the Commandant is not on the lookout, Private von Valverden? See you, I have had my suspicions since yesterday, and I tell you..."