"Schneider joined the Legion, as we discovered at the court-martial, for no reason. He was suffering from the European disease that afflicts, mostly, well-to-do men, and which is confined almost entirely to the continent of Europe, the disease that makes a man go off and commit suicide or join the Legion--for no reason. He is tired of life. These men are nearly always of high intelligence, but they have no belief in a God, and as in the case of Schneider, they often keep no faith with a friend. They are very crafty. We have had several of them in the service and I speak from knowledge. "When Schneider, after a couple of months of Algeria, began to dislike the business, he determined to make an end of it; but knowing that it was next to impossible to escape by ordinary ways, he enlisted his old mother and his sister in his service. No heart, you see. "I believe what is wrong with men like him is a brain that tires of ordinary stimuli and seeks for new sensations; well, he is receiving plenty of them in the criminal battalion, building roads down there in the south. It is a remedy that will cure him, if it does not kill him." THE LITTLE PRINCE I He was a man of twenty-eight or so, and he had not entered the Legion in the ordinary manner, by way of a draft from Oran. He had enlisted at Sidi-bel-Abbès. Jacques had begun by disliking him, on account of his fine airs and finicking ways. Faced with the ordinary, depressing, everyday duties of a légionnaire's life, Karasloff--for that was the name the newcomer had enlisted under--after a first momentary revolt had accepted everything with the air of a fatalist. He evidently possessed some money, as he was able to pay for small services such as the washing of his fatigue uniform and the cleaning of his equipment, but he rarely stood treat in the canteen and he was not over-generous with his cigarettes. Every evening he left the barracks with the rest and went off to Sidi-bel-Abbès, but he was scarcely ever seen on the Place Sadi Carnot, where the légionnaires congregated to hear the band; Sidi-bel-Abbès swallowed him, and no man knew where he went or what he did with his time, and no man particularly cared. Now Karasloff was most evidently a gentleman, a man of refinement, and most certainly a man with a past, and in any other regiment in the world there would have been much speculation and gossip as to where he came from, who he was and what he had done; but the Legion cares about nothing but itself, it heeds neither the past nor the future, and the past of Karasloff was of no interest to it. Jacques had begun by disliking this man, then he had taken an interest in him, and had finished by becoming his friend. There was something strangely childlike and simple in the character of Karasloff that developed on closer acquaintanceship; it puzzled Jacques; what puzzled him more was the mystery of how Karasloff spent his time when off duty.