which had been the centre of all their hopes and joys; before them the
dim, dark country, and the woe-stricken faces of their neighbours, and
the moving soldiery with their torches, and the quivering forms of the
half-dying horses.

Suddenly a voice arose from the armed mass: "Bring me the peasant
hither."

Bernadou was seized by several hands and forced and dragged from his
door out to the place where the leader of the uhlans sat on a white
charger that shook and snorted blood in its exhaustion. Bernadou cast
off the alien grasp that held him, and stood erect before his foes. He
was no longer pale, and his eyes were clear and steadfast.

"You look less a fool than the rest," said the Prussian commander. "You
know this country well?"

"Well!" The country in whose fields and woodlands he had wandered
from his infancy, and whose every meadow-path and wayside tree and
flower-sown brook he knew by heart as a lover knows the lines of his
mistress's face!

"You have arms here?" pursued the German.

"We had."

"What have you done with them?"

"If I had had my way, you would not need ask. You would have felt them."