Sitting on Joubert's knee and listening to tales of battle, and sniffing him at the same time, I could see the Mamelukes charging, backgrounded by the Pyramids; I could hear the thunder of Marengo, the roar of the cannons, and the drums of war leading the Grand Army over the highways of Europe. Echoes from the time before I was born. What a splendid nurse for a child an old soldier makes if he is of the right sort! Joubert was my nurse and my picture-book. A drummer of fifteen, he had beaten the charge for the "Growlers" at Waterloo, when the 121st of the Line, shoal upon shoal of bayonets, had stormed La Haye Sainte. He had received a bullet in the shoulder during that same charge; he had killed an Englishman; but all that seemed little compared with the fact that--HE HAD SEEN NAPOLEON! Joubert was driving us. We were bound for the Schloss Lichtenberg, not far from Homburg, on a visit to Baron Carl Lichtenberg, a relation of my mother. Of course, we could have travelled by more rapid means of transport, but it suited the humour of my father to travel just as he did in his own carriage, driven by his own man, with all his luggage about him, after the fashion of a nobleman of the year 1810. We had stopped at Carlsruhe, we had stopped at Mayence, we had stopped here and there. How that journey lies like a living and lovely picture in my mind! Time has blown away the dust. I do not feel the fatigue now. The vast blue sky of a continental summer, the poplar trees, the fields, the storks' nests, the old-time inns, Carlsruhe and its military bands, Mayence and its drums and marching soldiers, the vivid blue of the Rhine, and the courtyards and pleasaunces of the lordly houses we stopped at, lie before me, a picture made poetical by distance, a picture which stands as the beginning of my life and the beginning of this story of war and love. Joubert was driving us. "Joubert," cried my father, "we are near Frankfort now. Remember, the Hôtel des Hollandaise." Joubert, who had been speechless for miles, flung up his elbows just as a duck flings up her wings, he gave the horses a cut with the whip, and then he burst out: "Frankfort. Ah, yes! Frankfort. Do you think I can't smell it? I can smell a German town a league away, just as I can see a German woman a league away, by the size of her feet. Ah, mon Dieu! Come up, Cæsare; come up, Polastron. My God! Frankfort!" At a hotel, before strangers, in any public place, it was always "Oui, mon Général," "Oui, monsieur"; but alone, with no one to listen, Joubert talked to the General just as the General talked to Joubert. An extraordinary and solid friendship cemented the relationship of master and man ever since that terrible day in the library of the Château de Saluce, when Joubert had torn the pistol from the hand of his master, flung it through the glass of the great window, and, turning from a paid servant into a man tremendous and heroic, had wrestled with him as the angel wrestled with Jacob.