What would have become of us, carried away as we were, no one knows, if we had not been marched back again by higher orders.  We were straightway sent down to the right, toward Malmaison, to gather the wounded.  We passed Trochu and staff, who saluted us, and we wound down the hill, with the infantry before us, and the cannon and mitrailleuses behind us bellowing over our heads.  The French soldiery sent up cheer after cheer for “les Americains” as we made our way, still shouting, “While we were marching through Georgia.”  There were twenty or twenty-five of us, and we made some noise.  In the streets of Rueil we found the dead and wounded very thick.  We filled our wagons with the wounded, and started back for our hospital at Paris.  In our wagon we had seven, so we had to walk along beside it.  It was late in the night when we reached the city gate.  There we were confronted by sentinels with glaring torches, challenged, asked the number of our wounded, and then allowed to rattle and creak over the draw-bridge.  Just inside the walls we were met by a surging mass of anxious men, women and children.

“What regiment have you?” they would shout.  “Has the Hundred-and-fifth been engaged?  Have the Zouaves been in?”

“Yes,” exclaimed one from our wagon, rising on his elbow, “they have been in, and many haven’t come out again.”  Then snatching his fez from his head, he waved it in the glare of the torches, I and cried, “Vive la France! vive la Republique!”

That poor fellow was shot in the hip.  We so far cured him at the hospital that I saw him hobbling into the fight upon a cane, his gun strapped across his back, at the last sortie of the besieged.  I got very well acquainted with him, too, at the hospital, as I did with many another gallant fellow on both sides.  He was an educated gentleman of Alsace:  he had entered the Zouaves as a volunteer at the outbreak of the war, and had fought it all through in the ranks.  He was sergeant when he was wounded.  After the war and Commune were over I was touched on the shoulder by some one sitting upon the seat back of me at the Opera Comique one night, and there was my brave friend the sergeant, safe and almost sound through all.

At the hospital, the night after the sortie I have just been telling you of, we worked with our wounded until nearly morning.  Dr. Swinburne, I think, did not go to bed at all.  And right here I ought to introduce you more particularly to the old doctor.  Take the portrait of General Grant, run a good many streaks of gray through his hair and beard, a few more lines on his forehead and crows’ feet around his eyes, and you have an idea of the doctor’s looks.  He is a man of great energy and few words—­a surgical genius and a great lover of horses.  He could or would explain nothing.  At last we got to calling him “Old Compound Fracture,” for he would say, when we were starting for a fight likely to be serious, “Boys, don’t mind those slightly wounded fellows—­let the