carriages open and closed; a miscellaneous assortment of traps that he had certainly set eyes on before. It was daylight still; the sun had just sunk in the canal at the point where it vanished in the horizon and the long, straight stretch of water was like a sea of blood, and Maurice was trying to make up his mind what to do when a woman who stood near stared at him a moment and then exclaimed: “Why goodness gracious, is it possible! Are you the Levasseur boy?” And thereon he recognized Madame Combette, the wife of the druggist, whose shop was on the market-place. As he was trying to explain to her that he was going to ask good Madame Desvallières to give him a bed for the night she excitedly hurried him away. “No, no; come to our house. I will tell you why—” When they were in the shop and she had cautiously closed the door she continued: “You could not know, my dear boy, that the Emperor is at the Desvallières. His officers took possession of the house in his name and the family are not any too well pleased with the great honor done them, I can tell you. To think that the poor old mother, a woman more than seventy, was compelled to give up her room and go up and occupy a servant’s bed in the garret! Look, there, on the place. All that you see there is the Emperor’s; those are his trunks, don’t you see!” And then Maurice remembered; they were the imperial carriages and baggage-wagons, the entire magnificent train that he had seen at Rheims. “Ah! my dear boy, if you could but have seen the stuff they took from them, the silver plate, and the bottles of wine, and the baskets of good things, and the beautiful linen, and everything! I can’t help wondering where they find room for such heaps of things, for the house is not a large one. Look, look! see what a fire they have lighted in the kitchen!”