"But he disappeared--the emperor disappeared--he vanished," persisted the scholar. [Illustration: "_Your Emperor was banished to a rock"--The Exiled Emperor (From the Painting by W Q Orchardson, entitled "Napoleon on board the Bellerophon_.")] "Yes; he disappeared," the veteran admitted. "For after that came the Russian Campaign. Ah, but it was a cold one! Such snow, such ice; so cold, so cold! It was then I lost my eye. My leg I left at Austerlitz, my arm at Jena; my eye I dropped somewhere in the Beresina,--so much the better. I could not see that freeze-out. Then they sent me here. And since that I do not know what has happened. They tell me--you tell me--much. But to believe such foolish stories! Bah! I am not a baby. They tell me that the emperor--my emperor--was exiled to Elba; that he returned again to France; that he reigned a hundred days; that a battle was fought at--where was it?" "Waterloo," suggested the scholar. "Eh, yes, you say, at Waterloo; and you say we lost it? As if we could lose a battle, and Napoleon there! Then you will say that the empire was no longer an empire, but a kingdom; and that he who governed was called Louis the Eighteenth, and others after him, but not my emperor. Bah! foolish stories all!" "But they are true, old Nonesuch," said the youngster sadly. "Yes; they are true," echoed the other veterans. And the scholar added, "Yes; and your emperor was banished by those rascal English to a rock--the rock of St. Helena--a horrid rock, miles and miles out in the ocean. But he is here among us again." The Soldiers' Home, in the midst of his veterans, in the heart of his beautiful Paris. [Illustration: Napoleon (1. The General 2. The Consul 3. The Conqueror 4. The Emperor.)] Old soldiers are apt to be boastful when they tell, as did the Nonesuch, of the deeds of a leader whom they so often followed to victory. Madame Foa's pen has long since stopped its task of writing of French heroism for the boys and girls of France; but it never wrote anything more attractive or inspiring than the delicious bit of boasting that it put into the mouth of this dear and battered old veteran of Napoleon's wars,--Corporal Nonesuch of the Soldiers' Home. For, if the American boys and girls who have followed this story will read, as I trust they will, the entire life-story of this marvellous man,--Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French,--they will learn that much of the boasting of old Nonesuch was true story, as he assured his comrades; while some of it, too, was,--let us say, the exaggeration of enthusiasm.