196 SPORT AND TRAVEL PAPERS 



When about to leave the room, one of the councillors asked 

 me about the journey from Orleans, and when told of my 

 quarters of the night before, he excitedly requested further 

 particulars, and everybody else seemed strangely on the qui vive. 

 Wondering greatly I gave these, when with one accord the City 

 Council jumped up as if horror-struck and made for the door. 

 Thinking that the people had suddenly gone mad, I shouted for 

 an explanation, and was given from a distance the following 

 solution of the riddle. The barn in which I had so peacefully 

 slumbered had only just been vacated by a large number of 

 small- pox patients hence the bountiful supply of straw on the 

 floor which I had found so useful ! 



Small-pox then was raging along the Loire among the French 

 wounded, and my barn had been used as a temporary hospital. 

 It was a nasty idea, and no wonder the city fathers fled from 

 me but there were other things to think about than a possible 

 attack of that terrible malady, and neither my horse nor I felt 

 any the worse in consequence. 



Oats, so necessary for our horses, were very difficult to get ; 

 stores of them which still existed here and there in the country 

 were most carefully hidden away in all sorts of curious places to 

 avoid a German requisition ; until fully convinced of one's non- 

 German nationality to ask for a grain was useless. It was 

 hidden in cellars, between double walls, in caverns, &c., &c. 

 Even after repeated assurances that there really was rien-de-tout t 

 a good feed was often given to my horse but in the apron of the 

 landlady and the darkest corner of the stable into which no 

 uninvited eye could look. Articles of food, all drinks, live 

 stock, &c., were hidden before the German advance. In one 

 instance, to my knowledge, numerous bottles full of the various 

 curious liqueurs, so dear to Frenchmen, were deeply buried in 

 the garden of an inn. Shortly afterwards a German curassier 

 noticing with his practised eye that the ground had lately been 

 disturbed, continued his researches and uncovered bottle after 

 bottle, greatly to his own delight, but not at all to that of the 

 landlady, who heaped every abuse upon all cuirassiers in 

 particular and the whole German Army in general. 



