Anon the brass bands struck up between the echoing streets of Saarbrück; but amid all the enthusiasm of the time, the crash of the martial music, the measured tramping of thousands of marching feet, Charlie's mind could not help reverting to those happy moments in the stair of the Hoch Munster, and the sadder ones in the quiet little church of Burtscheid, and, in memory, he still saw the rosy, trembling lips of the girl he loved, and the full bosom that rose and fell with sobs and sighs. When would he be marching home, and what might happen then? Would it come to pass that he might never return, but find a grave in the soil of France? They were now within thirty miles of Metz. He cast a backward glance to where the rearguard was descending a slope, and, as if to reply to his surmises, there came marching with it a corps of grave-diggers, for a force of this kind was attached to every column, while 'by an arrangement characterised by a grim horror, yet unquestionably useful,' every Prussian officer and soldier was ordered to wear round his neck a label, to establish his identity in case of his being killed. These reflections were but momentary, so Charlie's spirit rose again, and his heart beat responsive to the sharp and regulated crash of the drums; for there is much elasticity of mind in healthy twenty-eight or thirty years, and Charlie's were no more. The enthusiasm all over Germany was unquestionably great at this time, and as a specimen of it, Heinrich told Charlie, exultingly, how his father's old comrade and brother officer, Field Marshal the Count Von Wrangel, then in the eighty-fourth year of his age, on seeing his old regiment, the 3rd Cuirassiers, marching through Berlin, had petitioned the king for leave to join them as a private, as he was now too aged to lead; but the king declined the offer of the brave old man, and requested him to remain in Berlin, and make himself useful in a more peaceable way. On the early morning of the 2nd of August, Charlie Pierrepont was subaltern of the out-picket posted on the road that leads direct from the open town of Saarbrück towards Metz, where then the Emperor Napoleon III. commanded in person. He had returned from visiting his line of advanced sentinels, all of whom stood motionless, with musket ordered and bayonet fixed, with their faces turned in the direction of Metz, each longing, no doubt, for the relief and a pipe. Stiff, and chilled with the rain and dew of the summer night, Charlie shook himself, as a dog might do, and proceeded to light a cigar and look around him, as the dawn brightened, little foreseeing that this would be one of the most important days in the new current of events.