And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell like a falling star,
Excelsior!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
THE SENTINEL’S POUCH
Private William Baum, of the Prussian army, as he stood peering into the darkness, was almost wishing that the Austrians and Russians, whose camp-fires he could see along the other side of the valley, would make an attack, and give him something else to do than shiver in the wet. But they did not; and Baum, growing colder and wetter every minute, wished himself back in his snug little apple-orchard at the foot of the Giant Mountains, where he used to be in bed every night before the village clock tolled ten, after a good supper of brown bread and cabbage.
“If the king had to be out in a night of this sort,” he said aloud, “he’d soon be as tired of war as I am.”
“And how do you know he hasn’t?” broke in a sharp voice, close beside him.
At once Baum was himself again. The first sign of a stranger approaching his post recalled him to his duty as a soldier.