The train made a long stop in the effort to put more people into the already overcrowded coaches.  I leaned forward, wishing to get some news, and the funny thing was that I could not think how to speak to those boys in English.  You may think that an affectation.  It wasn’t.  Finally I desperately sang out:—­

“Hulloa, boys.”

You should have seen them dash for the window.  I suppose that their native tongue sounded good to them so far from home.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“From up yonder—­a place called La Fere,” one of them replied.  “What regiment?” I asked.

“Any one else here speak English?” he questioned, running his eyes along the faces thrust out of the windows.

I told him no one did.

“Well,” he said, “we are all that is left of the North Irish Horse and a regiment of Scotch Borderers.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Retreating—­and waiting for orders.  How far are we from Paris?”

I told him about seventeen miles.  He sighed, and remarked that he thought they were nearer, and as the train started I had the idea in the back of my head that these boys actually expected to retreat inside the fortifications.  La! la!

Instead of the half-hour the train usually takes to get up from here to
Paris, we were two hours.

I found Paris much more normal than when I was there two weeks ago, though still quite unlike itself; every one perfectly calm and no one with the slightest suspicion that the battle line was so near—­hardly more than ten miles beyond the outer forts.  I transacted my business quickly—­saw only one person, which was wiser than I knew then, and caught the four o’clock train back—­we were almost the only passengers.

I had told Pere not to come after us—­it was so uncertain when we could get back, and I had always been able to get a carriage at the hotel in Esbly.

We reached Esbly at about six o’clock to find the stream of emigrants still passing, although the roads were not so crowded as they had been the previous day.  I ran over to the hotel to order the carriage—­to be told that Esbly was evacuated, the ambulance had gone, all the horses had been sold that afternoon to people who were flying.  There I was faced with a walk of five miles—­lame and tired.  Just as I had made up my mind that what had to be done could be done,—­die or no die,—­Amelie came running across the street to say:—­

“Did you ever see such luck?  Here is the old cart horse of Cousine Georges and the wagon!”

Cousine Georges had fled, it seems, since we left, and her horse had been left at Esbly to fetch the schoolmistress and her husband.  So we all climbed in.  The schoolmistress and her husband did not go far, however.  We discovered before we had got out of Esbly that Couilly had been evacuated during the day, and that a great many people had left Voisins; that the civil government had gone to Coutevroult; that the Croix Rouge had gone.  So the schoolmistress and her husband, to whom all this was amazing news, climbed out of the wagon, and made a dash back to the station to attempt to get back to Paris.  I do hope they succeeded.