at Cairo.  Now, here’s another side of the story.  Napoleon absent, France was letting herself be ruined by the rulers in Paris, who kept back the pay of the soldiers of the other armies, and their clothing, and their rations; left them to die of hunger, and expected them to lay down the law to the universe without taking any trouble to help them.  Idiots! who amused themselves by chattering, instead of putting their own hands in the dough.  Well, that’s how it happened that our armies were beaten, and the frontiers of France were encroached upon:  THE MAN was not there.  Now observe, I say man because that’s what they called him; but ’twas nonsense, for he had a star and all its belongings; it was we who were only men.  He taught history to France after his famous battle of Aboukir, where, without losing more than three hundred men, and with a single division, he vanquished the grand army of the Turk, seventy-five thousand strong, and hustled more than half of it into the sea, r-r-rah!

“That was his last thunder-clap in Egypt.  He said to himself, seeing the way things were going in Paris, ’I am the savior of France.  I know it, and I must go.’  But, understand me, the army didn’t know he was going, or they’d have kept him by force and made him Emperor of the East.  So now we were sad; for He was gone who was all our joy.  He left the command to Kleber, a big mastiff, who came off duty at Cairo, assassinated by an Egyptian, whom they put to death by impaling him on a bayonet; that’s the way they guillotine people down there.  But it makes ’em suffer so much that a soldier had pity on the criminal and gave him his canteen; and then, as soon as the Egyptian had drunk his fill, he gave up the ghost with all the pleasure in life.  But that’s a trifle we couldn’t laugh at then.  Napoleon embarked in a cockleshell, a little skiff that was nothing at all, though ’twas called ‘Fortune’; and in a twinkling, under the nose of England, who was blockading him with ships of the line, frigates, and anything that could hoist a sail, he crossed over, and there he was in France.  For he always had the power, mind you, of crossing the seas at one straddle.

“Was that a human man?  Bah!

“So, one minute he is at Frejus, the next in Paris.  There, they all adore him; but he summons the government.  ’What have you done with my children, the soldiers?’ he says to the lawyers.  ’You’re a mob of rascally scribblers; you are making France a mess of pottage, and snapping your fingers at what people think of you.  It won’t do; and I speak the opinion of everybody.’  So, on that, they wanted to battle with him and kill him—­click! he had ’em locked up in barracks, or flying out of windows, or drafted among his followers, where they were as mute as fishes, and as pliable as a quid of tobacco.  After that stroke—­consul!  And then, as it was not for him to doubt the Supreme Being, he fulfilled his promise to the good God, who, you see, had kept