Cigarette threaded her agile way up the dark, ladder-like shaft, and opened her door. There was a dim oil wick burning; the garret was large, and as clean as a palace could be; its occupants were various, and all sound asleep except one, who, rough, and hard, and small, and three-legged, limped up to her and rubbed a little bullet head against her lovingly. “Bouffarick--petite Bouffarick!” returned Cigarette caressingly, in a whisper, and Bouffarick, content, limped back to a nest of hay; being a little wiry dog that had lost a leg in one of the most famous battles of Oran, and lain in its dead master's breast through three days and nights on the field. Cigarette, shading the lamp with one hand, glanced round on her family. They had all histories--histories in the French Army, which was the only history she considered of any import to the universe. There was a raven perched high, by name Vole-qui-Vent; he was a noted character among the Zouaves, and had made many a campaign riding on his owner's bayonet; he loved a combat, and was specially famed for screaming “Tue! Tue! Tue!” all over a battlefield; he was very gray now, and the Zouave's bones had long bleached on the edge of the desert. There was a tame rat who was a vieille moustache, and who had lived many years in a Lignard's pocket, and munched waifs and strays of the military rations, until, the enormous crime being discovered that it was taught to sit up and dress its whiskers to the heinous air of the “Marseillaise,” the Lignard got the stick, and the rat was condemned to be killed, had not Cigarette dashed in to the rescue and carried the long-tailed revolutionist off in safety. There was a big white cat curled in a ball, who had been the darling of a Tringlo, and had traveled all over North Africa on the top of his mule's back, seven seasons through; in the eighth the Tringlo was picked off by a flying shot, and an Indigene was about to skin the shrieking cat for the soup-pot, when a bullet broke his wrist, making him drop the cat with a yell of pain, and the Friend of the Flag, catching it up, laughed in his face: “A lead comfit instead of slaughter-soup, my friend!”