"Look here," he cried, after a pause, as a happy thought crossed his mind, and without pausing to state how his own head was, he fired off another question:--"I say, who did you live with before we found you?" "I don't know," said the boy, looking at him wonderingly, and as if he felt amused by his companion's questions. "You ask mother." "Here! Quick," whispered Tom. "Give me my bugle." "Shan't. I want it," replied the boy coolly. "But you must. Here's the Colonel and half the officers reined up at the side to see us go by." He snatched the bugle away as he spoke and threw the cord over his shoulder, drawing himself up smartly, and keeping step with the guard. Mrs Corporal Beane had caught sight of the group of officers they were approaching, and with her heart in her mouth as she called it, she hurried up to the side of the mule, catching up to it just as they came abreast of the Colonel, a quiet stern-looking officer whose hair was sprinkled with grey. Nothing escaped his sharp eyes, and he pressed his horse's side and rode close to the baggage mule. "What boy's that, my good woman?" "Mine, sir," said Mrs Beane huskily. "Indeed? Is that the little fellow who was found in the burned village?" "Yes, sir," faltered the woman, as she gazed in the Colonel's stern frowning countenance. "Humph!" he ejaculated, and drew rein for the rear of the regiment to file past. "And now my poor boy will be sent away, Joe," said the agitated woman that night; but Joe said nothing, not even when he felt his wife get up and go to where the little fellow was sleeping soundly, and he heard her utter a curious sobbing sound before she came to lie down again. But no orders were given next day for the boy to be sent to the rear, nor yet during the next week, during which the men were still hunting frogs, as they called it--frogs which took such big leaps that the toiling British soldiers could not come up to them. "Oh, if they only would let us," Joe used to say every night when he pulled off his boots to rest his feet. "It's my one wish, for we must give 'em a drubbing, or we shall never have the face to go back to old England again." Joe had his wish sooner than he expected. It was in a wild mountainous part of the beautiful country, so full of forest and gorge that there was plenty of opportunity for the French to hide their force on the mountain slopes of a lovely valley and let the English regiment get well past them before they attacked. The result was a desperate fight which lasted a couple of hours before the 200th managed to extricate themselves with the loss of many killed and wounded, and in spite of every man fighting like a hero, they were beaten and had to suffer the miseries of a retreat as well as a defeat.