soldiers under shade of the trees were practising the fife and the drum.
Caen seemed to be full of soldiers, marching and drilling for ever.
Louise, the handsome portress at the school, frankly avowed that she did
not know what the young women of her generation would do for husbands;
the conscription carried away all the finest young men. Janey loved to
watch the soldiers; she loved all manner of shows, and also to tell of
them. She asked Bessie if she would like to hear about the emperor's
_fête_ last month; and when Bessie acquiesced, she began in a discursive
narrative style by which a story can be stretched to almost any length:

"There was a military mass at St. Etienne's in the morning. I had only
just left father, but Mademoiselle Adelaide took me with her, and a
priest sent us up into the triforium--you understand what the triforium
is? a gallery in the apse looking down on the choir. The triforium at
St. Etienne's is wide enough to drive a coach and four round; at the
Augustines, where we went once to see three sisters take the white veil,
it is quite narrow, and without anything to prevent you falling over--a
dizzy place. But I am forgetting the _fête_.... It was _so_ beautiful
when the doors were thrown open, and the soldiers and flags came
tramping in with the sunshine, and filled the nave! The generals sat
with the mayor and the _prêfet_ in the chancel, ever so grand in their
ribbons and robes and orders. The service was all music and not long:
soldiers don't like long prayers. You will see them go to mass on Sunday
at St. Jean's, opposite the school.... Then at night there was a
procession--such a pandemonium! such a rabble-rout, with music and
shouting, soldiers marching at the double, carrying blazing torches, and
a cloud of paper lanterns that caught fire and flared out. We could hear
the discordant riot ever so far off, and when the mob came up our street
again, almost in the dark, I covered my ears. Of all horrible sounds, a
mob of excited Frenchmen can make the worst. The wind in a storm at sea