fingers were still buried in the ground.  A little farther on a captain, prone on his stomach, had raised his head to vent his anguish in yells and screams, and death had caught and fixed him in that strange attitude.  Others seemed to be slumbering among the herbage, while a zouave; whose blue sash had taken fire, had had his hair and beard burned completely from his head.  And several times it happened, as they traversed those woodland glades, that they had to remove a body from the path before the donkey could proceed on his way.  Presently they came to a little valley, where the sights of horror abruptly ended.  The battle had evidently turned at this point and expended its force in another direction, leaving this peaceful nook of nature untouched.  The trees were all uninjured; the carpet of velvety moss was undefiled by blood.  A little brook coursed merrily among the duckweed, the path that ran along its bank was shaded by tall beeches.  A penetrating charm, a tender peacefulness pervaded the solitude of the lovely spot, where the living waters gave up their coolness to the air and the leaves whispered softly in the silence.

Prosper had stopped to let the donkey drink from the stream.

“Ah, how pleasant it is here!” he involuntarily exclaimed in his delight.

Silvine cast an astonished look about her, as if wondering how it was that she, too, could feel the influence of the peaceful scene.  Why should there be repose and happiness in that hidden nook, when surrounding it on every side were sorrow and affliction?  She made a gesture of impatience.

“Quick, quick, let us be gone.  Where is the spot?  Where did you tell me you saw Honore?”

And when, at some fifty paces from there, they at last came out on the plateau of Illy, the level plain unrolled itself in its full extent before their vision.  It was the real, the true battlefield that they beheld now, the bare fields stretching away to the horizon under the wan, cheerless sky, whence showers were streaming down continually.  There were no piles of dead visible; all the Prussians must have been buried by this time, for there was not a single one to be seen among the corpses of the French that were scattered here and there, along the roads and in the fields, as the conflict had swayed in one direction or another.  The first that they encountered was a sergeant, propped against a hedge, a superb man, in the bloom of his youthful vigor; his face was tranquil and a smile seemed to rest on his parted lips.  A hundred paces further on, however, they beheld another, lying across the road, who had been mutilated most frightfully, his head almost entirely shot away, his shoulders covered with great splotches of brain matter.  Then, as they advanced further into the field, after the single bodies, distributed here and there, they came across little groups; they saw seven men aligned in single rank, kneeling and with their muskets at the shoulder in the position of aim, who had been hit