will strike your ear, but your thoughts of a few moments before will not come back again. The funeral will only be a pretty picture for you, the growl of the cannon a grand military accompaniment, and there will be nothing in common between this picture, these sounds, and the clear, personal impression of suffering and death called up by the sight of the operating-room. Pass the church, the barricade, and you enter the most animated, the liveliest quarter of the city. On both sides of the street are shop signs, eating-house signs. Here are merchants, women with men’s hats or with handkerchiefs on their heads, officers in elegant uniforms. Everything testifies to the courage, the assurance, the safety of the inhabitants. Enter this restaurant on the right. If you want to listen to the sailors’ and the officers’ talk, you will hear them relate the incidents of the night before, of the affair of the 24th; hear them grumble at the high price of the badly cooked cutlets, and mention the comrade recently killed. “Devil take me! we are badly off where we are now,” says the bass voice of a pale, blond, beardless, newly appointed officer, his neck wrapped in a green knit scarf. “Where is that?” some one asks. “In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer; and at this reply you attentively look at him, and feel a certain respect for him. His exaggerated carelessness, his violent gestures, his too loud laughter, which would shortly before have seemed to you impudent, become in your eyes the index of a certain kind of combative spirit common to all young people who are exposed to great danger, and you are sure he is going to explain that it is on account of the shells and the bullets that they are so badly off in the fourth bastion. Nothing of the kind! They are badly off there because the mud is deep. “Impossible to get up to the battery,” he says, pointing to his boots, muddied even to the upper-leathers. “My best gun captain was instantly killed to-day by a ball in his forehead,” rejoins a comrade. “Who was it? Mituchine?” “No, another man.--Look here! are you never going to bring me my chop, you villain?” says he, speaking to the waiter.--“It was Abrossinoff, as brave a man as lived. He took part in six sorties.”