Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/179

 This is only away from us by a day or so, you say? It is strange: it seems to me half a lifetime.

It was a horrible season. The streets ran wine and blood. The populace was drunk, and savage in its drunkenness. The palaces were pillaged, the churches reeked with filth. I fought without the gates when I could: when I could not, I shut myself in my garret, so that I should not see or hear. So far as I had sense to feel, my heart was sick for France.

One day, when I was going from the fortifications through the by-streets to the place that sheltered me, I passed through a street which had been almost utterly destroyed by shell and fire.

The buildings were mere skeletons, the hearths and homes mere heaps of calcined dust. The rafters, the bricks, the iron girders, the rubble and the rubbish had fallen pell-mell amidst the broken mirrors, the shattered gilding, the scorched pictures: perhaps under the mountains of cinders and of ruin the charred bodies of the dwellers and the owners might be lying: no one knew.

It was all desolate, dark, unutterably miserable.

Yet amidst it all there was one lovely living thing, surrounded everywhere by devastation, but uncrushed, unharmed, untouched. In what had once been a green and cherished little garden there