glow of fire from somewhere behind.  More lumps, fragments of shell that had been shot into the air by the explosion, rained down upon the roof.  I got up and went to the kitchen window.  A house on one of the silent streets between the city and the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke were rolling off into the starlit night, and voices were heard all about murmuring in the shadows.  I hurried on my clothes and went down to the cellar.

The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire revealed a clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one wall, and a stack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in paper, was banked against the other.  In the straw lay three oldish men, fully clad in the dark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer Corps; one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were stretched out flat in the mysterious grossness of sleep.  A door from the cellar to a sunken garden was open, and through this opening streamed the intense radiance of the rising fire.  At the opening stood three men, my visitor of the evening, a little, wrinkled man with Napoleon III whiskers and imperial, and an old, dwarfish fellow with a short neck, a bullet head, and close-clipped hair.  Catching sight of me, the Burgundian said:—­

“Well, son, you see it is hammering away (ca tape) ce soir.”

Hearing another shell, he slammed the door, and stepped to the right behind the stone wall of the cellar.

“Very bad,” croaked the dwarf.  “The Boches are throwing fire shells.”

“And they will fire shrapnel at the poor bougres who have to put out the fires,” said the little man with the imperial.

“So they will, those knaves,” croaked the dwarf in a voice entirely free from any emotion.  “That fire must be down on the Boulevard Ney,” said the bearded man.

“There is another beginning just to the right,” said the Burgundian in the tone of one retailing interesting but hardly useful information.

“There will be others,” croaked the dwarf, who, leaning against the cellar wall, was trying to roll a cigarette with big, square, fumbling fingers.  And looking at a big, gray-haired man in the hay, who had turned over and was beginning to snore, he added:  “Look at the new man.  He sleeps well, that fellow” (ce type la).

“He looks like a Breton,” said the man with the imperial.

“An Auvergnat—­an Auvergnat,” replied the dwarf in a tone that was meant to be final.

The soldier, who had just been sent down from Paris to take the place of another recently invalided home, snored on, unconscious of our scrutiny.  The light from the fires outside cast a rosy glow on his weather-worn features and sparse, silvery hair.  His own curiosity stirred, the corporal looked at his list.

“He came from Lyons,” he announced.  “His name is Alphonse Reboulet.”

“I am glad he is not an Auvergnat,” growled the dwarf.  “We should have all had fleas.”