Why do you do this to me?" he then said sadly to himself, turning his eyes and face toward those people as if he were really speaking to them. "What have you against me? Have I done anything to you? I have done nothing. Why did I give that boy a blow? But why did he come and insult me? Who had provoked him? Who was annoying you? What do you wish of me? I have offended no one, I do not know you even; I am a poor soldier and am doing my duty, and stand here because I am ordered to do so. Yes, ridicule and hiss at me; you do yourselves honor to treat your soldiers. in such a way . . . just as if they were brigands!"

At that point, a stump of cabbage thrown with great force grazed the ground, and bouncing and whistling fell at his feet. "God! God!" he murmured in a desperate tone of voice, covering his face with one hand and resting his forehead on the other, which was leaning on the mouth of his gun. shall lose my head! I cannot control myself much longer. The blood is rushing to my head!

"But it is quite useless," he added a moment later in a trembling and stifled voice; "it is useless to make us wear these". . . and he gave a hard blow on the two medals that he wore on his breast, making them hit each other and resound; "it is useless for them to give us medals because we have fought for our country, if afterward they are to throw cigar stumps and cabbage heads in our faces! Oh, you wish to make me abandon my post, do you? You wish me to betray my trust. If you were fifty or even a hundred, you could not force me to move from here; if you should all spring upon me at once, I would sooner be torn to pieces like a dog. Come on, you cowards! Don't insult me from a distance. Yes, yes, I understand, it is useless for you to make signs at me; I know that you have knives in your pockets; but you won't quite dare to plant them in my stomach in broad daylight. You would prefer sticking them into my back at night . . . when . . .".

Suddenly he uttered a sharp cry, let his musket fall, covered his face with his hands, tottered, and fell at the foot of his зentry box: a stone had hit him on the forehead.

All the soldiers rushed forward, the crowd dispersed and disappeared; the wounded man was carried into the guardroom with his face and chest bleeding; the wound was instantly washed, his head bound up, he was given something to drink, and a bed was prepared for him on the table with the camp

blankets of the other soldiers. While they were all gathering around him, and overwhelming him with questions and words of comfort, and the sergeant was scolding him for not having asked assistance at the first insult of those people, an officer suddenly entered, and behind him the first file of a squad of soldiers. At the same moment, plunged forward by a vigorous push, there dashed into the middle of the room a man with distorted face, hair hanging over his forehead, and clothes in rags. He had been arrested on that same little square by the soldiers of a squad who were passing, and to whom he had offered a violent resistance.

At the first appearance of the prisoner the wounded soldier sprang up from the table, made a dash at him, placed himself face to face with him, looked at him a moment with flashing eyes, uttered a cry, which came broken and hoarse from between his clinched teeth, took a step backward, and resting proudly on his right foot, and raising his left hand, with the first finger pointing to the face of the man, who was watching him with fear: "Ah, you are the one!" he shrieked in a tone that froze one's blood; "I recognize you! You called me hangman in the street and have broken my head with a stone on the square; now it's your turn!" Saying which, he sprang at him, seized him by the collar of his jacket and shirt, pinned him with one dash against the wall, raised his clinched and trembling fist, and aimed at his head with angry, bloodshot eyes.

...

.. All this took place in an instant; those present interfered, separated them, held the wounded man by the arm, a corporal supported the other, who was ready to drop, and both stood for a moment looking into each other's eyes, panting and gasping; the one white from fear, his arms hanging and his head bowed; the other with his face flaming and haughty, his fists clinched, and his whole body shaken by a violent tremor. Meanwhile a crowd of inquisitive people had gathered before the guardroom door.

The officer looked from one to the other, and asked the sergeant the cause of the trouble. The latter related all that he knew. The officer then turned toward the prisoner, who held his chin down on his chest, and in the midst of a profound silence, said in an extraordinarily quiet tone:

"I can understand that, from a barricade, a man may cast things at a battalion, with some end or aim in view, but this useless and stupid insult to an inoffensive soldier, who has

neither the responsibility or right to defend himself, is one of the most disgusting pieces of cowardice that can stain a citizen." A murmur of approbation was heard among the crowd at the door.

"Take that man away!" added the officer, lighting the end of a cigar in a flame of the lantern.

"And you," he said, turning toward the wounded soldier, while the patrol led the prisoner off, "forgive . . . and forget.” The soldier gave a nod in the affirmative.

"And keep up your spirits," concluded the officer, putting the cigar in his mouth.

"As for me," replied the soldier, closing his teeth on the cigar and taking it between his forefinger and thumb, "I am always in good spirits; but you must understand, lieutenant, that these are things that try one."

So the drama ended with a laugh.

THE LAND OF PLUCK.

(From "Holland and Its People.")

WHOEVER looks for the first time at a large map of Holland wonders that a country so constituted can continue to exist. At the first glance it is difficult to see whether land or water predominates, or whether Holland belongs most to the continent or to the sea. Those broken and compressed coasts; those deep bays; those great rivers that, losing the aspect of rivers, seem bringing new seas to the sea; that sea which, changing itself into rivers, penetrates the land and breaks it into archipelagoes; the lakes, the vast morasses, the canals crossing and recrossing each other, all combine to give the idea of a country that may at any moment disintegrate and disappear. Seals and beavers would seem to be its rightful inhabitants; but since there are men bold enough to live in it, they surely cannot ever sleep in peace.

What sort of a country Holland is, has been told by many in few words. Napoleon said it was an alluvion of French rivers, the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Meuse, and with this pretext he added it to the Empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of transition between land and sea.

of earth floating on the water.

Another, as an immense crust
Others, an annex of the old

continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth and the beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud and sand; and Philip II, called it the country nearest to hell.

But they all agreed upon one point, and all expressed it in the same words: Holland is a conquest made by man over the sea; it is an artificial country: the Hollanders made it; it exists because the Hollanders preserve it; it will vanish whenever the Hollanders shall abandon it.

To comprehend this truth, we must imagine Holland as it was when first inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered away in search of a country.

It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous lakes, like seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one tract after another covered with brush wood; immense forests of pines, oaks, and alders, traversed by herds of wild horses and so thick were these forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing from tree to tree without ever putting foot to the ground. The deep bays and gulfs carried into the heart of the country the fury of the northern tempests. Some provinces disappeared once every year under the waters of the sea, and were nothing but muddy tracts, neither land nor water, where it was impossible either to walk or to sail. The large rivers, without sufficient inclination to descend to the sea, wandered here and there uncertain of their way, and slept in monstrous pools and ponds among the sands of the coasts. It was a sinister place, swept by furious winds, beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a perpetual fog, where nothing was heard but the roar of the sea and the voices of wild beasts and birds of the ocean. The first people who had the courage to plant their tents there, had to raise with their own hands dikes of earth to keep out the rivers and the sea, and lived within them like shipwrecked men upon desolate islands, venturing forth at the subsidence of the waters in quest of food in the shape of fish and game, and gathering the eggs of marine birds upon the sand.

Cæsar, passing by, was the first to name this people. The other Latin historians speak with compassion and respect of these intrepid barbarians who lived upon a "floating land," exposed to the intemperance of a cruel sky and the fury of the mysterious northern sea; and the imagination pictures the Roman soldiers, who, from the heights of the uttermost citadels of the empire, beaten by the waves, contemplated with wonder and pity those wandering tribes upon their desolate land, like a race accursed of heaven.

Now, if we remember that such a region has become one of the most fertile, wealthiest, and best regulated of the countries

of the world, we shall understand the justice of the saying that Holland is a conquest made by man. But, it must be added, the conquest goes on forever.

To explain this fact- to show how the existence of Holland, in spite of the great defensive works constructed by the inhabittants, demands an incessant and most perilous struggle—it will be enough to touch here and there upon a few of the principal vicissitudes of her physical history, from the time when her inhabitants had already reduced her to a habitable country.

Tradition speaks of a great inundation in Friesland in the sixth century. From that time every gulf, every island, and it may be said every city, in Holland, has its catastrophe to record. In thirteen centuries, it is recorded that one great inundation, besides smaller ones, has occurred every seven years; and the country being all plain, these inundations were veritable floods. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the sea destroyed a part of a fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems, and swallowed up more than thirty villages. In the course of the same century, a series of inundations opened an immense chasm in northern Holland, and formed the Zuyder Zee, causing the death of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled the Meuse, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventytwo villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the sea burst the dikes of Zealand, destroying hundreds of villages, and covering forever a large tract of country. In 1570 a storm caused another inundation in Zealand and in the province of Utrecht; Amsterdam was invaded by the waters, and in Friesland twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great inundations took place in the seventeenth century; two terribles ones at the beginning and the end of the eighteenth; one in 1825 that desolated North Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel, and Gueldres; and another great one of the Rhine, in 1855, which invaded Gueldres and the province of Utrecht, and covered a great part of North Brabant. Besides these great catastrophes, there happened in different centuries innumerable smaller ones, which would have been famous in any other country, but which in Holland are scarcely remembered: like the rising of the lake of Haarlem, itself the result of an inundation of the sea; flourishing cities of the gulf of Zuyder Zee vanished under the waters; the islands of Zealand covered again and again by the sea, and again. emerging; villages of the coast, from Helder to the mouths of the Meuse, from time to time inundated and destroyed; and in