“Qui vive?” said a low voice.

“Anglois, bete!” answered I, in a low tone:  and added, “mais les corsairs ne se battent pas”

“Cest vrai” said he; and growling, “bon soir” he was soon out of sight.  I scrambled back to the castle, gave the countersign to the sentinel, and showed my new great coat with a vast deal of glee and satisfaction; some of my comrades went on the same sort of expedition, and were rewarded with more or less success.

In a few days the dead bodies on the breach were nearly denuded by nightly visitors; but that of the colonel lay respected and untouched.  The heat of the day had blackened it, and it was now deprived of all its manly beauty, and nothing remained but a loathsome corpse.  The rules of war, as well as of humanity, demanded the honourable interment of the remains of this hero; and our captain, who was the very flower of chivalry, desired me to stick a white handkerchief on a pike, as a flag of truce, and bury the bodies, if the enemy would permit us I went out accordingly, with a spade and a pick-axe; but the tirailleurs on the hill began with their rifles, and wounded one of my men.  I looked at the captain, as much as to say, “Am I to proceed?” He motioned with his hand to go on, and I then began digging a hole by the side of a dead body, and the enemy, seeing my intention, desisted from firing.  I had buried several, when the captain came out and joined me, with a view of reconnoitring the position of the enemy.  He was seen from the fort, and recognized; and his intention pretty accurately guessed at.

We were near the body of the colonel, which we were going to inter; when the captain, observing a diamond ring on the finger of the corpse, said to one of the sailors, “You may just as well take that off:  it can be of no use to him now.”  The man tried to get it off, but the rigidity of the muscle after death prevented his moving it.  “He won’t feel your knife, poor fellow,” said the captain; “and a finger more or less is no great matter to him now:  off with it.”

The sailor began to saw the finger-joint with his knife, when down came a twenty-four pound shot, and with such a good direction that it took the shoe off the man’s foot, and the shovel out of the hand of another man.  “In with him, and cover him up!” said the captain.

We did so; when another shot not quite so well directed as the first, threw the dirt in our faces, and ploughed the ground at our feet.  The captain then ordered his men to run into the castle, which they instantly obeyed; while he himself walked leisurely along through a shower of musket-balls from those cursed Swiss dogs, whom I most fervently wished at the devil, because, as an aide-de-camp, I felt bound in honour as well as duty to walk by the side of my captain, fully expecting every moment that a rifle-ball would have hit me where I should have been ashamed to show the scar.  I thought this funeral pace, after the funeral was over, confounded nonsense; but my fire-eating captain never had run away from a Frenchman, and did not intend to begin then.