Sister Gabrielle.
A REMINISCENCE OF MAX O’RELL DURING THE WAR.
By His Wife.
HEN the Franco-Prussian War broke out I was a young girl, and the awful news of the commencement of hostilities made a profound impression upon me. When, four years later, I met and married my husband, it was one of my great delights to get him to tell me "all about the war." Of the many reminiscences of his soldier days, none, perhaps, interested me more than the story of a sweet nun who nursed him in St. Malo Hospital. This is the story just as I heard it for the first time years ago. I hope it will not lose too much by not being told in French, as it was then given to me.
"A piece of spent shell hit me."
We were sitting by the bridge of Neuilly, near the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris: "There," said my husband, "is just about the spot where I was knocked over. We were fast getting the better of the Communards, and my men were warming to the work in grand style, when the piece of spent shell hit me, and some of the fellows carried me off to hospital. I remember being puzzled that there should be relatively no pain in a wound of that sort; but the pain came soon enough when the fever set in. The doctor of the Versailles Hospital was a rough specimen, as army doctors often are—in France, at any rate—and you may fancy that the groans and moans of the other wounded were not soothing either. One day the doctor told me I should soon be able to be removed to a country hospital. That was after I had been under his treatment for six weeks.
"The sights, sounds, and smell of the place had grown so sickening to me that I think I could have kissed him when he talked of sending me to St. Malo. He came in one morning, and, in his brusque way, said, as he probed the wound for bits of shattered bone:
"'We shall be able to pack you off in a few days. You would like to get transferred to St. Malo, would you not? You come from that part of the country, don't you? The air will suit you.'
"He was a brute, but he had awfully good cigars, and used to make me smoke one when he was going to have an extra go at my wound. I suppose he hoped the goodness might prove infectious, I used to call him strings of bad names while he was digging away at his work on my arm. Somehow it relieved me, and, truth to tell, he took it all in good part.
"In a few days, then, I saw the last of him, and he of me; and glad enough was I to find myself in the clean, quiet, nun-tended hospital in the dear old Breton town. There I had a room to myself, as each officer had; and
