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A terrible cry echoing suddenly through the town stopped the soldier's speech. A brilliant light illuminated the young officer. The poor orderly was shot in the head and fell. A fire of straw and dry wood blazed up like a conflagration not thirty feet distant from the young commander. The music and the laughter ceased in the ballroom.
The finest epitaph ever inscribed above a soldier's grave was that graven on the stone which marked the resting-place of the deathless three hundred who fell at Thermopylae: Go, stranger, to Lacedaemon, And tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her laws.
By Duke Ferdinand he was recommended to Friedrich, the goal of all his efforts, as of every vagrant soldier's in those times: and here at last, as Quintus Icilius, he has found permanent billet, a Battalion and gradually three Battalions, and will not need to roam any farther.
She went with him to the kitchen and helped him to dress, and then opened the door for him. "Now, Tom, you are to go home and tell your aunt you are sorry for what happened this afternoon; because you should not have spoken as you did. And remember, Tom, that a soldier's first duty is obedience." And without giving him a chance to demur, she nodded good-bye and ran into the house.
Fanny was a modest little mulatto woman, a soldier's wife, and a company laundress. She had escaped from the main-land in a boat, with that child and another. Her baby was shot dead in her arms, and she reached our lines with one child safe on earth and the other in heaven. I never found it needful to give any elementary instructions in courage to Fanny's husband, you may be sure.
"'The Soldier's Bride," cried a voice, and Kalman began to sing. He had a beautiful face with regular clean-cut features, and the fair hair and blue grey eyes often seen in South Eastern Russia. As he sang, his face reflected the passing shades of feeling in his heart as a windless lake the cloud and sunlight of a summer sky. The song was a kind of Hungarian "Young Lochinvar."
Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between her teeth: "It must be so; I am a knight, And I am off to Palestine." This Madame Thenardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and angular the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of romances.
"When you engaged me, sir," he began, "you were under the impression that I was a straightforward English servant. Sir," he added, "I was nothing of the sort." I looked at his bronzed, clean-shaven face, fair hair and soldier's blue eyes, in wonderment. "What are you talking about, Brooks?" I asked. The man's tone disturbed me. I had grown quite fond of him, and feared he was going to give notice.
Into that blended heat and cold, dead blackness and burning glare, he reeled out from her presence; drunk with pain as deliriously as men grow drunk with raki. The challenge rang on the air: "Who goes there?" He never heard it. Even the old, long-accustomed habits of a soldier's obedience were killed in him. "Who goes there?" the challenge rang again. Still he never heard, but went on blindly.
The lady who relates the story saw the features so clearly on this occasion that she afterwards recognized the soldier's portrait some six months later, when calling at a friend's house, and exclaimed: "Why, look! There is the General!" as soon as she noticed it. One really beautiful ghost story has, however, come down to us. Phlegon of Tralles was a freedman of the Emperor Hadrian.
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