death’s-head on the reverse.  The fearful consumption of human life which drained the land, sweeping off almost one entire generation of able-bodied men, and leaving the tillage of the fields to the decrepitude of age, feebly aided by female hands, gave ample opportunity to gratify the ardent minds panting to exchange the tame drudgery of school and college for the limited, but to them world-wide, authority of the subaltern’s sword and epaulet.  There seemed to them but one road to advancement.  The profession of arms was the sole pursuit which opened a career bounded only by the wildest dreams of ambition.  What had been could be; and the fortunate soldier might find no check in the progressive honors of his course, until his brows should be encircled by the insignia of royalty.  It required more than mortal courage for a young man to intimate a preference for some more peaceful occupation.  A learned profession might be sneeringly tolerated; but woe to him who spoke of agriculture, or commerce, or the mechanic arts!  There was little comfort for the luckless wight who, in some unguarded moment, gave utterance to such ignoble aspirations.  Henceforth he was, like the Pariah of India, cut off from human sympathy, and the young gentlemen whose tastes and tendencies led them to prefer the more aristocratic trade of butchery felt that there was a line of demarcation which completely and conclusively separated them from him.

This predilection for military life received no small encouragement from the occasional visit of some young Caesar, whose uniform had been tarnished in the experiences of one campaign, and who returned to his former associates to indulge in an hour of unalloyed glorification.

Napoleon, when he entered the Tuileries after prostrating some hostile kingdom, never felt more importance than did the young lieutenant in his service when he passed the ponderous doors which ushered him into the presence of his old schoolfellows.  What a host of admirers crowded around him!  What an honor and privilege to be standing in the presence, and even pressing the hand or rushing into the embrace, of an officer who had really seen bayonet-charges and heard the whistling of grapeshot!  How the older ones monopolized the distinguished visitor, and how the little boys crowded the outer circle to catch a word from the military oracle, proudly happy if they could get a distant nod of recognition!  And then the questions which were showered upon him, too numerous and varied to be answered.  And how he described the forced marches, and the manoeuvring, and the great battle!—­how the cannonade seemed the breaking up of heaven and earth, and the solid ground shook under the charges of cavalry; how, yet louder than all, rang the imperial battle-cry, maddening those who uttered it; how death was everywhere, and yet he escaped unharmed, or with some slight wound which trebled his importance to his admiring auditors.  He would then tell how,