To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with two very good feelings--- laughter and companionship. For it was my good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders to challenge once and then to fire. Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of a growing tree. This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt, and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line. Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I went down the road. Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain, and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles, because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a wide turnpike. Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses-- _Ave Crux Spes Unica._ I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I looked backward along the road I had come.