Who on earth would find a box planted vertically in the very middle of a garden? It would have required a wizard to find it there.
We could not have found it again ourselves if I had not made a guiding mark on the wall.
One fine day we saw some soldiers come past, flying at full speed. Soissons had just been taken; they had leapt their horses over the ramparts, and six or eight had been killed or badly injured; three or four had escaped.
My poor mother began now to be frightened in real earnest, and her fear took the form of cooking an enormous haricot of mutton. The reader may well ask why her fear took that peculiar form.
Fearful pictures had been spread over the country of Cossacks from the Don, the Volga and the Borysthenes: making them look as hideous as possible. They were depicted mounted on hideous scarecrows, wearing caps made of wild beasts' skins, armed with lances, bows and arrows. A combination of utter impossibilities, one would have said.
Yet there were optimists who, in spite of these awful pictures, said that the Cossacks were brave men at heart, much less wicked than they looked to be, and that, provided we fed them well enough and gave them plenty to drink, they would do us no manner of harm.
Hence my mother's huge stew of mutton—it was for them to eat.
In the matter of drink, we did not give them our cellar (for we have seen to what use my mother had put it), but we set them aside our wine-bin, and they could then draw what Soissons' wine they liked.
Then, finally, if, in spite of the haricot mutton and the Soissons' wine, they still proved too objectionable, we were to escape by way of the quarry.