at full speed, and again broke up our antagonists.  But again we saw squadron after squadron blocking up the road.  All was now desperate.  But Frederick’s law of arms was well known—­“the officer of cavalry who waits to be charged, must be broke.”  We made a plunge at our living circumvallation; but the French dragoons had now learned common sense—­they opened for us—­and when we were once fairly in, enveloped us completely; it was then a troop to a brigade; fifty jaded men and horses to fifteen hundred fresh from camp.  What happened further I know not.  I saw for a minute or two a great deal of pistol firing and a great deal of sabre clashing; I felt my horse stagger under me, at the moment when I aimed a blow at a gigantic fellow covered all over with helmet and mustache; a pistol exploded close at my ear as I was going down, and I heard no more.

On opening my eyes again, I found the scene strangely altered.  I was lying in a little chamber hung round with Parisian ornament—­a sufficient contrast to a sky dark as pitch, or only illumined by carbines and the sparkles of sabres delving at each other.  I was lying on an embroidered sofa—­an equally strong contrast to my position under the bodies of fallen men and the heels of kicking horses.  A showy Turkish cloak, or robe de chambre, had superseded my laced jacket, purple pantaloons, and hussar boots.  I was completely altered as a warrior; and, from a glimpse which I cast on a mirror, surrounded with gilt nymphs and swains enough to have furnished a ballet, I saw in my haggard countenance, and a wound, which a riband but half concealed, across my forehead, that I was not less altered as a man.

All round me looked so perfectly like the scenes with which I had been familiar in my romance-reading days, that, bruised and feeble as I was, I almost expected to find my pillow attended by some of those slight figures in long white drapery with blue eyes, which of old ministered to so many ill-used knights and exhausted pilgrims.  But my reveries were broken up by a rough voice in the outer chamber insisting on an entrance into mine, and replied to by a weak and garrulous female one, refusing the admission.  The dialogue was something of this order—­

“Strong or weak, well or ill, able or not able, I must send him, before twelve o’clock this night, to Paris.”

“But the poor gentleman’s wounds are still unhealed.”

“Still he must set out.  The ‘malle poste’ will be at the door; and, if he had fifty wounds on him, he must go.  The marquis is halfway to Paris by this time; perhaps more than halfway to the guillotine.”

This was followed by a burst of sobs and broken exclamtions from the female, whom I discovered, by her sorrowing confessions, to have been a nurse in the family.

“Well,” was the ruffian’s reply; “women of all ages are fools:  what is it to you whether this young fellow is shot or hanged?  He was taken in arms against the Republic—­one and indivisible.  All the enemies of France must perish!”