What the deuce is the old usurer up to? Can he too be celebrating Christmas? Has he assembled his friends and family to drink to the Vaterland? Impossible. Everybody knows that old Cahn has no Fatherland but his money-safe. Neither has he relatives nor friends; he has only creditors. His sons, or rather his partners, have been away for three months with the army. They are trading yonder behind the luggage-vans of the landwehr, selling brandy, buying clocks, ripping the knapsacks fallen by the wayside, and searching the pockets of the dead at night on the battle-field. Father Cahn, too old to follow his children, has remained in Bavaria, where he is doing a flourishing business with the French prisoners. He hovers about the quarters, loans money on watches, buys epaulets, medals, and money-orders. He ferrets his way through hospitals and ambulances, and creeps noiselessly to the bedside of the wounded, inquiring in his hideous jargon,-- "Aff you zumting to zell?" And now he is trotting along hurriedly with his basket on his arm, because the military hospital closes at five, and because two Frenchmen are waiting for him there, in that great gloomy building behind the iron grating of narrow windows, where Christmas finds nothing to cheer its vigil but the pale lamps that burn at the bedside of the dying. II. These two Frenchmen are Salvette and Bernadou, two light-infantry men, two Provençals from the same village, enlisted in the same battalion and wounded by the same shell. But Salvette has proved the hardier of the two; he is able now to get up and to take a few steps from his bed to the window. Bernadou, on the other hand, has no desire to recover. Behind the faded curtains of his hospital bed, he languishes and grows thinner day by day; and when he speaks of his home, he smiles that sad smile of invalids which contains more resignation than hope. He seems a little brighter to-day, however, as he recalls the celebration of Christmas, which in our beautiful land of Provence is like a bonfire lighted in the heart of winter. He thinks of the walk home after midnight Mass, of the bedecked and luminous churches, the dark and crowded village streets, then the long evening around the table, the three traditional torches, the _aïoli_, the dish of snails, the pretty ceremony of the _cacho fio_,--the Yule log, which the grandfather parades through the house and sprinkles with mulled wine.