But this is a digression. In twenty minutes, shorn and shaven, I was back again in the Mayor's parlour. The tears of gratitude stood in his eyes. I learned afterwards that a decoration was contingent on his preservation of the public peace on the occasion of the evacuation. Started by the Mayor, the report rapidly circulated through St. Meuse that I had cut off my beard rather than that it should be possible that any one should mistake me for a German. From being a suspect I became a popular idol. The French journalists entertained me to a banquet at night at which in libations of champagne eternal amity between France and England was pledged. Next morning the Germans went away and then St. Meuse kicked up its heels and burst into exuberant joy. The Mayor took me up to the station in his own carriage to meet the French troops, and introduced me to the colonel of the battalion as a man who had made sacrifices for _la belle France_. The colonel shook me cordially by the hand and I was embraced by the robust vivandière, who struck me as being in the practice of sustaining life on a diet of garlic. When we emerged from the station I was cheered almost as loudly as was the colonel, and a man waved a tricolour over my head all the way back to the town, treading at frequent intervals on my heels. In the course of the afternoon I happened to approach the civic band which was performing patriotic music in the Place St. Croix. When the bandmaster saw me he broke off the programme and struck up "Rule Britannia!" in my honour, to the clamorous joy of the audience, who were thwarted in their aim of carrying me round the Place shoulder-high only by the constancy with which I clung to the railings which surround Chevert's statue. But the crowning recognition of my sacrifice came at the banquet which the town gave to the French officers. The Mayor proposed the toast of "our English friend." "We had all," he said, "made sacrifices for _la Patrie_--he himself had sustained the loss of a wooden outhouse burned down in the bombardment; the gallant colonel on his right had spilt his blood at St. Privat. Them it behoved to suffer and they would do it again cheerfully, for it was, as he had said, for _la Patrie_. But what was to be said of an honourable gentleman who had sacrificed the most distinguishing ornament of his physical aspect without the holy stimulus of patriotism, and simply that there might be obviated the risk of an embroilment to the possible consequence of which he would not further allude? Would it be called the language of extravagant hyperbole, or would they not rather be words justified by facts, when he ventured before this honourable company to assert that his respected English friend had by his self-sacrifice saved France from a great peril?" The Mayor's question was replied to by a perfect whirlwind of cheering. Everybody in the room insisted upon shaking hands with me and I was forced to get on my legs and make a reply.