We all sprang to our feet.  A shell had crashed into the house and exploded in the room above us.  Bushels of plaster fell among us.  That modest and murmurous young lady sprang erect.

“Jumping Jee-rusalem!” she cried.

Haberton, who had also risen, stood as one petrified—­as a statue of himself erected on the site of his assassination.  He neither spoke, nor moved, nor once took his eyes off the face of Orderly Arman, who was now flinging his girl-gear right and left, exposing his charms in the most shameless way; while out upon the night and away over the lighted camps into the black spaces between the hostile lines rolled the billows of our inexhaustible laughter!  Ah, what a merry life it was in the old heroic days when men had not forgotten how to laugh!

Haberton slowly came to himself.  He looked about the room less blankly; then by degrees fashioned his visage into the sickliest grin that ever libeled all smiling.  He shook his head and looked knowing.

“You can’t fool me!” he said.

CURRIED COW

My Aunt Patience, who tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had a favorite cow.  This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one, for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of kicking.  She would kick all day and get up in the middle of the night to kick.  She would kick at anything—­hens, pigs, posts, loose stones, birds in the air and fish leaping out of the water; to this impartial and catholic-minded beef, all were equal—­all similarly undeserving.  Like old Timotheus, who “raised a mortal to the skies,” was my Aunt Patience’s cow; though, in the words of a later poet than Dryden, she did it “more harder and more frequently.”  It was pleasing to see her open a passage for herself through a populous barnyard.  She would flash out, right and left, first with one hind-leg and then with the other, and would sometimes, under favoring conditions, have a considerable number of domestic animals in the air at once.

Her kicks, too, were as admirable in quality as inexhaustible in quantity.  They were incomparably superior to those of the untutored kine that had not made the art a life study—­mere amateurs that kicked “by ear,” as they say in music.  I saw her once standing in the road, professedly fast asleep, and mechanically munching her cud with a sort of Sunday morning lassitude, as one munches one’s cud in a dream.  Snouting about at her side, blissfully unconscious of impending danger and wrapped up in thoughts of his sweetheart, was a gigantic black hog—­a hog of about the size and general appearance of a yearling rhinoceros.  Suddenly, while I looked—­without a visible movement on the part of the cow—­with never a perceptible tremor of her frame, nor a lapse in the placid regularity of her chewing—­that hog had gone away from there—­had utterly taken his leave.  But away toward the pale horizon a minute black speck was traversing the empyrean with the speed of a meteor, and in a moment had disappeared, without audible report, beyond the distant hills.  It may have been that hog.