But his wrongs rankled in him.  He vented antique phrases such as, “I want a change;” “This village is the last place the Almighty made,” etc.

Then he was attacked with a moral disease:  affected the company of soldiers.  He spent his weekly salary carousing with the military, a class of men so brilliant that they are not expected to pay for their share of the drink; they contribute the anecdotes and the familiar appeals to Heaven:  and is not that enough?

Present at many recitals, the heroes of which lost nothing by being their own historians, Dard imbibed a taste for military adventure.  His very talk, which used to be so homely, began now to be tinselled with big swelling words of vanity imported from the army.  I need hardly say these bombastical phrases did not elevate his general dialect:  they lay fearfully distinct upon the surface, “like lumps of marl upon a barren soil, encumbering the ground they could not fertilize.”

Jacintha took leave to remind him of an incident connected with warfare—­wounds.

“Do you remember how you were down upon your luck when you did but cut your foot?  Why, that is nothing in the army.  They never go out to fight but some come back with arms off, and some with legs off and some with heads; and the rest don’t come back at all:  and how would you like that?”

This intrusion of statistics into warfare at first cooled Dard’s impatience for the field.  But presently the fighting half of his heart received an ally in one Sergeant La Croix (not a bad name for a military aspirant).  This sergeant was at the village waiting to march with the new recruits to the Rhine.  Sergeant La Croix was a man who, by force of eloquence, could make soldiering appear the most delightful as well as glorious of human pursuits.  His tongue fired the inexperienced soul with a love of arms, as do the drums and trumpets and tramp of soldiers, and their bayonets glittering in the sun.  He would have been worth his weight in fustian here, where we recruit by that and jargon; he was superfluous in France, where they recruited by force:  but he was ornamental:  and he set Dard and one or two more on fire.  Indeed, so absorbing was his sense of military glory, that there was no room left in him for that mere verbal honor civilians call veracity.

To speak plainly, the sergeant was a fluent, fertile, interesting, sonorous, prompt, audacious liar:  and such was his success, that Dard and one or two more became mere human fiction pipes—­of comparatively small diameter—­irrigating a rural district with false views of military life, derived from that inexhaustible reservoir, La Croix.

At last the long-threatened conscription was levied:  every person fit to bear arms, and not coming under the allowed exceptions, drew a number:  and at a certain hour the numbers corresponding to these were deposited in an urn, and one-third of them were drawn in presence of the authorities.  Those men whose numbers were drawn had to go for soldiers.  Jacintha awaited the result in great anxiety.  She could not sit at home for it; so she went down the road to meet Dard, who had promised to come and tell her the result as soon as known.  At last she saw him approaching in a disconsolate way.  “O Dard! speak! are we undone? are you a dead man?” cried she.  “Have they made a soldier of you?”