Welcome Spring Station was a welcome station to us. I felt so happy that I jumped out through the coach window, disdaining the commonplace convenience of a door. What appetites we had! What a dinner we ate! And what a glorious sleep we had on some corn-sacks in the stable!
Our route henceforth lay through a more settled country. No further danger from Indians was to be feared. We enjoyed the ride. The sight of mountains in the distance and soon, of tall pines all around us had a cheering influence on me. The lieutenant, who was in the very best humor, said he was so much accustomed to life on the plains that he had acquired a dislike to wooded countries. Even when on leave of absence in the East, where there was not the ghost of an Indian to be feared, he experienced a feeling of insecurity when in woodland. He wanted to have plenty of elbow room, he said, and to see all around him for miles.
We reached Sierra City without further incident next morning. The lieutenant and I parted, with many kind wishes on both sides and hope of meeting again.
I have not since met my military friend. I have even forgotten his name. My memory never was much better than a waste, and names were the very last things that would take root in it. I hope yet to meet my old Misty Mountain companion. When I do, may he be, at least, a major!
I returned over the same route. All was then quiet on the Misty Mountain. The only change I saw was that two more graves had been made by the side of MacSorley’s, on the high mound near the Big Sandy—“killed by Indians.”
Before I made my Misty Mountain trip, I had a boy’s usual desire for a soldier’s life. That trip was the turning-point in my desires. I have “seen Indians” since, and in my summer vacations have occasionally accompanied scouting parties against the hostile tribes. My further experience completed the change in my tastes. The life of a soldier on the frontier has no charms for me. Fighting Indians is far harder work than fighting a civilized foe. It is continued privation, suffering, and danger. Even success, so difficult of achievement in this species of warfare, is generally repaid, not by glory, but by misrepresentation and ingratitude.
I am content with my old desk in the dingy old office in the leathery old Swamp. The smell of the leather is more grateful to me than the purest of prairie breezes, which, when it plays with your locks, is unpleasantly suggestive, to those acquainted with the usages of Indian warfare.
ORLÉANS AND ITS CLERGY.
In the outskirts of Orléans, between the roads leading to Paris and Chartres, stands an antique chapel under the invocation of Notre Dame des Aydes—the remains of a former hospital. Thousands of pilgrims have been here to pray, from age to age: among them the last of the Valois, the indolent Henry III. A small statue of Our Lady of Aid on one of the gables seems to welcome and bless the traveller. To this sacred spot, that for ages had known no other sound but the voice of prayer and praise, and no other smoke but that of holy incense, came the din of war and the smoke of cannon. Around this asylum of peace took place one of the most thrilling scenes of the late war. The battalion of foreign legions held the place for a time under a frightful cannonading on the part of the Prussian forces. M. Arago, the commander, perished gloriously on the field of battle. The thirteen hundred men under him were of all races and climes. The Austrian mingled with the Italian; the negro of the desert with the Polish exile; the Chinese with the Servian prince. Of these, six hundred were killed or wounded; three hundred made prisoners; the remainder escaped to recommence the combat elsewhere. The Germans pressed on, leaving behind them the flaming houses of the faubourgs to record their triumph. They pushed into the very heart of the city—to the statue of Joan of Arc, which must have wept out its very heart of stone at its powerlessness to drive out this new invader—to the steps of the church where the holy maid once worshipped, or, if not the same, to one on the same spot, for the ancient church of Ste. Croix was destroyed by those Brise-Moutiers, the Calvinists, and rebuilt by Henry IV.