He rode once twenty leagues to deliver dispatches with a spear-head in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddle just as he gave them up to the commandant's own hands.

He saved the day, two years ago, at Granaila.

We should have been cut to pieces, as sure as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Chasseurs together, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with their shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest of the fight, and pierced the Arabs' center, and gave us breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the Arbicos back like a herd of jackals.

There are a hundred more like stories of him--every one of them true as my saber--and, in reward, he has just been made a galonne!" "Superb!" said the General, with a grim significance.

"Twelve years! In five under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade; but then"-- and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melancholy--"but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read them wrong.