“Oh, my!” sail a thin, squeaky voice on the back seat.  “I believe they are coming this way.  Do let us get out, SARAH.  I would rather die on the road than be murdered in such a sepulchre as this.”

She referred to a battalion of the Landwehr that had just denied into the road, not a hundred yards in front of us.

“Stop your sniffling back there!” peevishly exclaimed “OLD CONNECTICUT.”  “It would serve you right if they bayonetted you;” and she added emphasis to her expostulation by planting her chignon between my shoulder-blades with terrific force.

I felt at once that either my back or my gallantry would have to give way; so I took a bond of fate, and sacrificed the latter on the spot.

“That’ll do—­that’ll do,” I remonstrated.  “No more of that; if you want to knock the brains out of that haystack on the back of your head, why, knock away; but spare my bones, if you please.”

I looked around, and she looked around with such suddenness as to bring her nose in contact with the brim of my hat, and force the tears from her eyes.  She started to her feet, and I verily believe would not have postponed hostilities a moment, had not the door of the diligence just then been opened, and a Prussian officer demanded to see our papers.  I paraded the “documents,” and he said they were “good;” but he also said that we must make up our minds to halt here until the following morning, as there was a movement of the troops, and no vehicles would be permitted to pass this point.

Gaudeamus! I could have sworn, but my wrath sailed away when I saw what a volcano was working in the bosom of “OLD CONNECTICUT.”  She didn’t strike the officer, or utter a single complaint in his hearing, but sat down as if she had been a spile driven through the top of the coach, and let the vinegar run out of her eyes in pure impotency of speechless rage.

“SARAH’S” companion on the back seat broke forth afresh, and again wanted to know as to the probability of our being charged upon and put to the sword.  I couldn’t hear “SARAH’S” answers to these harrowing questions, but it seemed to me as if she were trying to throttle her timid friend into a perfect sense of security.  Whatever she did had the desired effect, and I heard no more from the “back seat.”

It was nightfall ere the several members of our little colony composed themselves to await in such tranquillity as they could command, the ordeal of sleeping, sitting bolt upright in a French diligence, upon a dark, tempestuous night, and surrounded on all sides by the dreadful presence of “red-handed war.”  The last thing I remember ere the drowsy god “MURPHY” sent his fairies to weave their cobwebs about my eyelids, was “OLD CONNECTICUT.”  She didn’t look like the battering-ram that she was.  She had taken that chignon for a pillow, and fastened it to the back of the seat.  Her head was thrown back; her chin had fallen, and at the extreme tip of her thin red nose a solitary tear glistened like a dew-drop on a beet.  Once, about midnight, she awoke me by her snoring, but I gave the old gal’s chignon a hitch, and it was all right again.