Next him, curled, dog-like, with
its round, black head meeting its feet, was a wiry frame on which every
muscle was traced like network, and the skin burned black as jet under
twenty years of African sun. The midnight streets of Paris had seen its
birth, the thieves' quarter had been its nest; it had no history, it had
almost no humanity; it was a perfect machine for slaughter, no more--who
had ever tried to make it more?
Further on lay, sleeping fitfully, a boy of scarcely more than
seventeen, with rounded cheeks and fair, white brow like a child's,
whose uncovered chest was delicate as a girl's, and through whose
long, brown lashes tears in his slumber were stealing as his rosy mouth
murmured, "Mere! Mere! Pauvre mere!" He was a young conscript taken from
the glad vine-country of the Loire, and from the little dwelling up in
the rock beside the sunny, brimming river, and half-buried under its
grape leaves and coils, that was dearer to him than is the palace to its
heir. There were many others beside these; and Cecil looked at them with
those weary, speculative, meditative fancies which, very alien to his
temperament, stole on him occasionally in the privations and loneliness
of his existence here--loneliness in the midst of numbers, the most
painful of all solitude.
Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of campaigning, in
the excitement of warfare; there were times even when it yielded him
absolute enjoyment, and brought him interests more genuine and vivid
than any he had known in his former world.
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