Full dark had come — the wintry darkness of a grey wet day in early March — before he got to Orléans. The train was of the variety known in France as omnibus, one of those dingy little locals that are made up of third-class compartments and that stop at every country station. As the train neared Orléans there was a noticeable increase in the travelling public: at every station there was a noisy traffic of arriving and departing passengers. For the most part the people had the look of the country: they came stamping in and out with muddy shoes, with a great banging of compartment doors, with a great tumult of voices, with the vigorous excitement of robust and talkative people.

They were a good-natured crowd, and seemed to know one another, if not actually by name, with the even completer familiarity of race and kind and region. At the sudden pauses at dim-lit country stations one could hear them shouting greetings and farewells, and see them streaming away along a muddy road towards the dim light and shine of a little town with all the utter, common, and dreary familiarity of March. And the train, in those abrupt and sudden halts and pauses, seemed to be almost as casual a means of transportation as a street-car: it would rattle up to a station halt, the people would stamp in and out with a banging of doors and with many shouts, cries, greetings, and farewells, then the shrill little whistle would make its fifing note and the train would rattle out into the wet and wintry countryside again.

In the compartments the lights were very low and dim, and cast flickering shadows on the faces of the passengers. Somewhere in the train, in another compartment, there was a noisy and jolly crowd of soldiers and robust country people. One man in particular dominated the whole train with his jolly energy, his vulgar and high-spirited good nature. The man’s rich voice was charged indescribably with the high, sanguinary vitality of the Frenchman. The voice, to a foreigner, was at once inimitably strange in accent, quality and intonation, and yet familiar as all life, all living. It was packed with the juice of life, and had the full rich qualities of a good wine.

For the youth, that voice heard there in the flickering shadows of the little train, heard with all its robust and full-blooded penetration at the casual and abrupt halts and pauses at little stations, was to be a strangely haunting one. A thousand times thereafter the tone of that rich voice would return to him and reverberate in his memory with the haunting, strange and wonderful recurrence with which the “little” things of life — a face seen one time at a window, a voice that passed in darkness and was gone, the twisting of a leaf upon a bough — come back to us out of all the violence and savage chaos of the days — the “little” things that persist so strangely, vividly, and inexplicably when the more sensational and “important” events of life have been forgotten or obscured.

So, now, the jolly voice of this unseen Frenchman, as it shouted out good-natured but derisive comments on the customs, the appearance, and the inhabitants of every little town at which they stopped, as it was answered in like fashion by the people on the station platforms, brought back to him instantly the memory of a little country town in the South at which, on his way to and from college, he had stopped a dozen times at just this hour. The name of the town was Creasman, there was a small sectarian school there which was known as Creasman College, and it had become traditional with the university students, who crowded the train on their journeys home or back to college, to thrust their heads out of the windows and howl with the derisive arrogance of youth: “Whoopee, girls! Creasman College!”

And this sally was usually answered by similar jibes and jeers from the group of students, townsfolk and country people who crowded the platform of the station “to see the train come through.”

In this Frenchman’s taunts and jeers, and in the way the people at the stations answered him, as well as in all the traffic of noisy, muddy, talking and gesticulating people who streamed in and out of the train at every halt, there was, in spite of all the local differences, the same essential quality that had characterized the halts at the little town set there upon the vast, raw Piedmont of the South.

Moreover, there was in the tone and texture of the Frenchman’s voice — at once so actual, living, and familiar in its high, sanguinary energy, and so foreign, alien, and troubling to a stranger’s ear — the whole warmth and vitality of centuries of living, a quality which brought the ancient past of Europe, and of France, to life, as the pages of history could never do.

In the same way the boy had long ago discovered that a single tone or shading in his mother’s or his father’s voice could touch the lost past of America — the past of the Civil War, the strange mysteries of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, which is, for most Americans, more far and strange in time than the Crusades — and bring it instantly into life.

Thus he had never gained a living image of the Civil War until he heard his mother speak of it one day. Until that time all his efforts to recapture that lost time out of the pages of books had been futile; the men, the battles, the generals, and the lives of all the people existed in a world of legendary unreality, and seemed, in fact, as different from the world he knew as if they had existed on a separate planet. And then one day he heard his mother — who had been only five years old when the war ended — describe the return of the troops along a country road near home. She told how the dust rose from the ragged feet of weary marching men and of how she sat upon her father’s shoulder as the troops went by, and of all her friends and kinsmen who were standing near her, and of the return of a cousin — a boy of sixteen years — starved, ragged, wearing a stove-pipe hat, and without shoes, of how the women wept and of the boy’s words of jesting and good-natured greeting, as he came to meet them.

Now, with the full rich accents of this unseen Frenchman, at once so strange and so familiar, all of the ancient life of France — her wars and histories, the great chronicles of her battles, and the brilliant and indestructible fabric of her life and energy through so many hundred years of victory and defeat, triumph and catastrophe — began to pulse with such a living and familiar warmth that it seemed to him as if the whole thing from the beginning had been compacted and resumed into the rich and sanguinary energies of this one Frenchman’s voice.

The man’s speech, a kind of furious and high-spirited repartee, carried on against all comers with an instant’s readiness, an animal vigour, that was almost like a national intoxication, was penetrated constantly by the exclamation “Parbleu!”

And more than anything else, it seemed to the youth, it was the tone and quality of that ancient exclamation, delivered with such a buoyant and animal vitality, that united the Frenchman to the distant past of his nation’s history, to millions of buried and forgotten lives, and through him, made that distant past blaze instantly with all the warmth and radiance of life again.

The Frenchman’s speech was lewd and ribald with the ............