At this sortie there rode with us a little French abbé, whom some of the boys had picked up weeks before roaming about the outposts among the trenches. He had won their hearts by his utter contempt of fire as he prayed with and confessed everybody he could lay hands on. At the sortie of Châtillon he had discovered one of our corps bringing in to the wagons at the risk of his life a huge pumpkin. The abbé imagined that Americans must set great value upon pumpkins if they were willing to secure them at such hazard, and he described the whole incident in _L'Univers_, the ultra-Catholic paper of Paris. In the course of a few days the ambulance Américaine received two or three polite notes from religious French maiden ladies, saying that they had a few pumpkins which were at the service of the gentlemen of the corps. We received the pumpkins, and skirmished for the ingredients of pumpkin-pie, which the matron of our hospital baked for us. This was an unknown use for pumpkins in France, and those pies cost about their weight in silver. Sugar we had--it was the eggs that cost. Horsemeat and pumpkin-pie! There was a wild extravagance in that dinner, but then it was patriotic--at least the dessert was. We nearly froze to death at Bourget, but I have not time to tell you of it. I must pass on to the last sortie--toward Montretout and Malmaison. That was a dark, foggy, leaden morning, with a drizzling rain. We passed through the whole French army on our way out--line, National Guards, Mobiles, artillery, cavalry: we passed through them all, everywhere meeting with a grateful reception. Sometimes they cheered us and our wagons (now increased to eight) and our immense coffee-pot. This last was an institution: it consisted of three great boilers mounted on wheels. Before the meat gave out we used sometimes to put soup in our coffee-pot and take it to the field. Coffee by some means we still had. Even on the desolate morning I am now telling you of many a poor foot-soldier who had been upon the almost impassable roads all night had been cheered by a sly tin cupful of the precious liquid as we trudged on toward the field. Well, we were finally ordered to halt at the little village of Rueil, within a stone's throw of the church where Josephine and Hortense lie buried. I climbed a hill on the left, and saw the French pushing toward Buzenval. They could see nothing before them but a line of fire--not a Prussian above the low wall in front of the thick mass of wood. Though I could see these Frenchmen dropping down by hundreds, they went steadily on and on. Some of them were National Guards who had never before been under fire. It was here that young Henri Regnault fell, with many other Parisians known in literature and art. After a while the Germans began shelling the hill on which I was, and I scampered down to the open square where the wagons were. It was not long, however, till another German battery got to throwing shells into this square, each discharge