for the energies of no one man that ever lived could have been equal to the task. Most of the time it was far away, and it only made two daily promenades past the hotel, but whenever I listened for it I could hear it, beating the same unweary rataplan. Then at intervals all day and every day, the big gun boomed and the clarion blared until I used to dream that I was back at Plevna or the Shipka Pass, and could not get my "copy" to London and New York because Monsieur Dorn had filled the Houssy Wood with Cossacks from Janenne. It may be supposed that all this charivari was but an evil thing for a man as much in need of rest as I was, but I verily believe that the noise and bustle of the preparations, though they robbed me now and then of an hour of morning sleep, were almost as useful to me as the idleness I enjoyed, and the tranquil country air into which I could drive or wander afoot whenever the fancy for perfect quiet came upon me.

At last the great day dawned, and the great event dawned earlier than the day. At five o'clock the noise of drum and clarion began, and the light of torches flared on the painted fronts of houses—yellow and pink and blue—in the quaint old village street. A little later a band came by with shattering brass and booming drum, and for an hour or so the whole place was in a ferment. The cavalry came clattering into the Place, the hoarse voice of Monsieur Dorn barked through the orders which had by this time grown conventional, and his squadron jingled for the last time for seven years through the movements he had taught them at the expense of so much time and lung power. Then a strange foreboding sort of quiet, an unnatural tranquillity, settled upon everything and continued until near upon the hour of ten. A long waggon drawn by four oxen excited, by the freight it bore, a momentary curiosity, and brought faces to doors and windows. The air was keen to-day, and we were at the very season of mid-winter, but in the waggon which the four slow oxen dragged through the streets of Janenne were a dozen lofty shrubs reaching to a height of eight or nine feet at least, the which shrubs were one mass of exotic-looking blossom. I discovered later on that they were nothing more than a set of young pines with artificial paper flowers attached to every twig, but the effect as they went down the wintry street in their clothing of gold and rose and white with the live green of the fir peeping through the wealth of bloom was quite an astonishment in its way. These decorated shrubs were set at the church porch, and seemed to fill the whole of that part of the street with colour and light.

When the procession came at last there was one curious thing about it. Such a crowd of people—for Janenne took part in it—that there was scarcely anybody left to look at it. But then the processionists had the pleasure of looking at each other. The band came first, in blue blouse and clean white trousers. Then came the soldiery, a motley crew, with Monsieur Dorn at their head, drawn sword in hand, and next to him a personage who might have been translated clean from Astley's—a gentleman in long hose, with a flower on each shoe, and a hat of red velvet shaped like a bread tray, decorated with prodigious coloured feathers, and a slashed doublet gay with many knots of bright ribbon. Years and years ago Janenne had a Count and a château. The ruins of the château still kept gray guard over the village street; but there is not even a ruin left of the old family. But in the day when Our Lady of Lorette stayed the local pestilence the existing Count of Janenne was pious enough to ride in the promised procession; and for a century or so the magnate of the village and its neighbourhood was never absent from the demonstration of thanksgiving. In a while, however, the Counts of Janenne took to wildish ways, and, leaving the home of their ancestors, went away to Paris and led extravagant lives there, gambling and drinking, and squandering their substance in other and even more foolish fashions, and at last there ceased to be estates of Janenne to draw upon, or even Counts of Janenne to draw. But before things came to this pass the absentee Counts had always sent a representative to join the procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette; and it has come about that the legend has clung in the popular fancy even unto the present day. Somebody—anybody—gets himself up in theatrical guise, and rides at the head of the military forces, between the first rank and the commander-in-chief, as the representative of that extinct great house. On this occasion it was a red-cheeked shy young man, cousin to the chambermaid of the Hotel des Postes, a peasant proprietor who farmed, and still farms, some ten or a dozen hectares of sour land on the road to Montcourtois. The red-cheeked shy young man's female cousin exchanged a red-cheeked, shame-faced, rustic grin with him as he rode by, and the young man, in imitation of Monsieur Dorn, made his horse caracole, but being less versed in horsemanship than the old gendarme, had to hold on ignominiously by the mane in payment for his own temerity.

Following the military came a long array of little girls in white muslin, with sashes blue or red. Half a dozen nuns kept watch over them, pacing sombre in white head-dresses and black gowns by the side of all that smiling troop of glad hearts and childish faces. All the little girls carried bannerets of bright colour, and all went bareheaded, after the manner of the district, where no woman, short of the highest fashion, ever permits herself to wear hat or bonnet, except when going to mass or upon a railway journey. White childish locks, braided and shining, red locks, brown locks, black locks, with bright faces under all, went streaming by, and then a solemn priest or two headed a rambling host of lads with well-scrubbed cheeks and clean collars, and decent raiment of church-going Sunday black. Then came a flock of young women in white muslin, very starched and stiff, with blue bows and blue sashes. In front of these two stalwart wenches bore a flapping banner, inscribed 'La Jeunesse de Janenne'; and closing up the rank of Janenne's youth and rustic beauty came half a dozen chosen damsels, big limbed and strong, bearing on their shoulders a huge waxen statue of Our Lady of Lorette, and in her arms a crowned child, she herself being crowned with glittering tinsel, and robed in a glowing and diaphanous stuff, which only half revealed the white satin and spangles of the dress below it. Then a number of chubby-cheeked little boys in semi-ecclesiastical costume, improvised—no doubt under clerical supervision—by careful hands at home. Each little boy carried a fuming censer, and it was not difficult to see that they were well pleased with themselves and their office. After them came the doyen in full ecclesiastical costume, a little tawdry perhaps, for the village is but poor and with the best heart in the world can only imitate the real splendours from afar. Then following the doyen (who, by the way, marched under a canopy like the roof of an old-fashioned four-post bedstead) came the male choir of the church, chanting a musical service, which harmonised indifferently with the strains of the military band in front. Then the big gun, drawn by the two big Flemish horses. Then Jacques, Jules, André, François, Chariot, Pierre, Joseph, Jean, and all the rest, in sabots, short trousers, and blue blouses, marching bareheaded with reverent air, and with them Julie, and Fifine, and Nana, and Adèle, and other feminine relatives, all in their Sunday best, and all devout in mien. Then, at a little distance—the most astonishing and unlooked-for tail to all this village splendour and devoutness—Schwartz.

Schwartz himself, but Schwartz so changed, so lean, so woebegone, as hardly to be recognisable, even to the eye of friendship. Of all his diverse-raging hairs not one to assert itself, but all plastered close with an oily sleekness by a slimy clinging mud, the thin ribs showing plainly, and the