“Our regiment, Monsieur, was the Twenty-seventh of the Line. It was drawn almost wholly from the towns and villages in these parts: Aries and Tarascon and Saint-Remy and Salon and Maillane and Château Renard--there is the old château, over on the hill yonder, beside the Durance--and Barbentane, that we shall see presently around the corner of the hill. We all were _Provençaux_ together, and the men of the other regiments of our division gave us the name of the Provence cats; though why they gave us that foolish name I am sure they never knew any more than we did ourselves. It was not because we were cowards, that I will swear: our regiment did some very pretty fighting in its time, as any one may know by reading the gazettes which were published in those days. “Our division held Mont Sapoune--the French right, you know--facing the Little Redan across the Carenage Ravine. It was early in the siege, and we had only drawn our first parallel: close against the Selinghinsk and Vallyrie redoubts, and partly covering the ground where we dug our rifle-pits later on. But we were going ahead with our work fast, and already we had thrown up the little redoubts known as No. 11 and No. 15, which covered the advancing earthwork leading to where our second parallel was to begin. Redoubt No. 11 was a good hundred yards, and Redoubt No. 15 was more than three times that distance outside of our lines; and everybody knew that these two advanced posts would be in great danger until our second parallel was well under way. So very possible was it that they might be surprised, and the guns turned on our own lines in support of a general attack, that in each of them spikes and hammers were kept in readiness against the need for spiking the guns before they fell into the enemy’s hands. Our regiment lay just behind these redoubts, in the rear of the artillerymen who manned our trenches; and as the gunners had plenty to do all day long, and through the night too sometimes, the work of keeping up the night pickets fell to our share. “It was while things were this way that I was on picket early one morning on our extreme left, close over the edge of the Carenage Ravine. I had come on with the midnight relief, and by five o’clock in the morning, when day wras just breaking, my teeth were chattering and I was stiff with cold. Name of a name, but it was cold those winter mornings! We have nothing like it, even when the worst mistral is blowing, in our winters here in Provence. Down in the ravine there was a thick mist, into which I could not see at all; but every now and then a whiff of wind would come in from the seaward and thin it a little, and then I would give a good look below me, for it was along the ravine that any party sent out to surprise us almost certainly would come.