He would take him out sometimes on a Sunday--Sunday is a whole holiday in the Legion--for walks on the ramparts, and the fact becoming known among his companions, he told the whole story right out about Karasloff, and as a result the regiment took an interest in the child. Ivan made his appearance in the barrack-yard sometimes hand in hand with his friend. It was wonderland to him. The drums and bugles, the légionnaires saluting their officers, the sentinels with fixed bayonets, the glare, the dust, the military atmosphere, all these things were for him splendid beyond words, fascinating beyond a grown-up person's idea of fascination. To be a légionnaire, what gifts could fortune hold out to mortal greater than that? Then these august beings joked with him and sometimes patted him on the head, pulled out their bayonets from their scabbards and pretended to stab him, taught him how to salute and nicknamed him the Corporal. Then, one day, surrounded with jesting légionnaires, he and Beaujon, the regimental tailor, had an interview, and Beaujon measured him as if for fun, took the girth of his chest and the length of his legs and arms, and then--a week later--Jacques appeared one evening at the shop of El Kobir with a bundle. It was a little uniform for Ivan to be worn on festive occasions, a complete corporal's uniform, _képi_ and all. Jacques for some time past had been out of sorts, with the manner of a man who has something weighing upon his mind. To-night he seemed more gloomy than ever, and when Ivan, after showing himself in his new uniform, went off to have it changed, Jacques turned to El Kobir. "All the same," said he, "the child must go. The sight of him in that turn-out has settled the business for me. Only yesterday, when Corporal Kempfer asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, he said, 'A légionnaire.'" Jacques laughed bitterly, as though reviewing mentally the légion of lost men to which he belonged, the regiment so glorious in the eyes of the child. Ah! if Ivan could have seen his regiment of heroes with the eyes of Jacques! and yet, who can say which were the clearer eyes, the eyes of the child or the eyes of the man? El Kobir put down his cigarette on the little ash-tray by his elbow, and turned from the rug he was engaged in doctoring. "Why must the child go?" said he. Jacques grumbled in his throat for a moment, then he burst out, "I don't know what ails me or why I should make _fantasie_ over the business. Do I want to get rid of the child? I've got fond of that child. He's got sense in his head, more sense than a battalion of numskull légionnaires. Now, when I don't want to do a thing, nobody can make me do it. I don't speak of regimental orders, but in ordinary things I say that when I don't want to do a thing nobody can make me do it. I don't want to get rid of the child; why then do I say he must go? I cannot tell you that.