dropped off to bed and things grew quieter, grandfather’s chair was apt to be the centre toward which all tended, and, of course, the old man talked about his youth.  Here are the reminiscences I heard once at the end of a merry evening, and at other times I heard something not unlike:  “Children and grandchildren and guest from over the sea, when I was a boy, Prussia was struggling with the first Napoleon; and when I was eighteen I marched myself under Bluecher beyond the Rhine.  Sometimes we went on the run, sometimes we got lifts in relays of waggons, and so I have known the infantry even to make now and then fifty miles a day.  Matters were pressing, you see (sehen Sie ’mal).  At last we crossed at Coblentz, and got from there into Belgium the first days of June.  We met the French at Ligny,—­a close, bitter fight,—­and half my battalion were left behind there where they had stood.  We were a few paces off, posted in a graveyard, when the French cavalry rode over old Marshal Vorwaerts, lying under his horse.  I saw the rush of the French, then the countercharge of the Prussian troopers when missed the General and drove the enemy back till they found him again; though what it all meant we never knew till it was over.  Then, after mighty little rest, we marched fast and far, with cannon-thunder in our ears in a constant mutter, always growing louder, until in the afternoon we came at a quickstep through a piece of woods out upon the plain by Waterloo, where they had been fighting all day.  Our feet sucked in the damp ground, the wet grain brushed our knees, as our compact column spread out into more open order and went into fire.  What a smoke there was about La Haye Sainte and Hougomont, with now lines of red infantry, or a column in dark blue, or a mass of flashing cuirassiers hidden for a moment, then reappearing!  It was take and give, hot and heavy, for an hour or so about Planchenoit.  A ball grazed my elbow and another went through my cap; but at sunset the French were broken, and we swept after the rout as well as we could through the litter, along the southward roads.  We were at a halt for a minute, I remember, when a rider in a chapeau with a plume, and a hooked nose underneath, trotted up, wrapped in a military cloak, and somebody said it was Wellington.”  Grandfather was sure to be at a white heat before he had finished, and so, too, his audience.  The athletic student grandson, with a deep scar across his cheek from a Schlaeger cut, rose and paced the room.  The Fraeulien, his sister, to whom the retired grenadier has told the story of the feather-beds at Weimar, showed in her eves she remembered it all.  “Yes, friend American!” breaks in the father of the family, “and it all must be done over again.  Sooner or later it must come, a great struggle with France; the Latin race or the Teutonic, which shall be supreme in Europe?  We are ready now; arsenals filled, horses waiting, equipments for everybody.  Son Fritz there has his uniform