unknown to him; and nothing more.

Weiss found words at last: "_Nom de Dieu!_ they have taken to killing
women!"

He had risen to his feet; he shook his fist at the Bavarians, whose
braid-trimmed helmets were commencing to appear again in the direction
of the church. The chimney, in falling, had crushed a great hole in
the roof of his house, and the sight of the havoc made him furious.

"Dirty loafers! You murder women, you have destroyed my house. No, no!
I will not go now, I cannot; I shall stay here."

He darted away and came running back with the dead soldier's rifle and
ammunition. He was accustomed to carry a pair of spectacles on his
person for use on occasions of emergency, when he wished to see with
great distinctness, but did not wear them habitually out of respect
for the wishes of his young wife. He now impatiently tore off his
double eyeglass and substituted the spectacles, and the big, burly
bourgeois, his overcoat flapping about his legs, his honest, kindly,
round face ablaze with wrath, who would have been ridiculous had he
not been so superbly heroic, proceeded to open fire, peppering away at
the Bavarians at the bottom of the street. It was in his blood, he
said; he had been hankering for something of the kind ever since the
days of his boyhood, down there in Alsace, when he had been told all
those tales of 1814. "Ah! you dirty loafers! you dirty loafers!" And
he kept firing away with such eagerness that, finally, the barrel of
his musket became so hot it burned his fingers.

The assault was made with great vigor and determination. There was no