Tuck-of-Drum still stood in the centre of the bridge. The drumsticks descended on a drum pierced and soundless—then dropped, one after the other, slowly, from his nerveless grasp. The world swung around him. The poplars down the roadway on which his glazing eyes were fixed marched, doubled, moved into echelon and square. “_La Grande Armée! La Grande Armée!_” Was it the cry of the Germans, in wonder, in derision, in pity? Or did his quivering lips frame the words? Ghosts formed round him; the ghosts of the old battalions who had marched, long back, into silence. They swayed, they heaved, in countless numbers; file after file, rank after rank, regiment after regiment, formed up, doubled into place, and passed him by. He saw the flash of breastplates, the crimson fronts of the Polish lancers, the red plumes of the line, the bearskins of the Guards, the glittering eagles of France. “My comrades—O my comrades!” He staggered forward, with stretched-out hands. A confused murmur buzzed in his ears; it swelled into a tumult—“_and the shout of a king was among them_.” One hand sought the bearskin. Suddenly he fell face forward. * * * * * Under the wide sky, in the uniform of their dead Emperor, the three veterans lay together; a young boy crouched near them, bleeding from an unnoticed wound, and sobbing. A night wind crept over the frozen fields; a little wind, like a sigh from France for her ruined homes, her smoking villages, her slain children, her lost cause and faded glories. The sun of Austerlitz sank down behind the poplars. _The Royal Road to Learning_ FREDDIE—What’s an honorary degree, dad? JOHNSON—That’s a title a college confers on a man who would never be able to get it if he had to pass an examination. * * * * * The hardest kind of work is looking for it. _The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner_ BY LEONORA BECK ELLIS Between the Southern negro as property and the Southern negro as a property-owner worthy of account, American progress has set its milestones thick and strongly marked. Yet, as mere years go, the time has been short indeed for a transition of meanings so vast. The act of emancipation brought in its train several very serious problems, and more than one of these must be acknowledged to have grown graver with further-reaching complexities and involutions as the decades have passed. But in the present article these are not under consideration. The point we desire to emphasize is that one of the most difficult questions brought to issue in the emancipation of the negro has already solved itself by what we are accustomed to call natural processes.