back leisurely as the enemy advanced, destroying whatever they could not remove along with them, and halting only at certain points, where intrenched camps had already been formed for their reception.  The difficulty of feeding half a million of men in a country deliberately wasted beforehand, and separated by so great a space from Germany, to say nothing of France, was sure to increase with every hour and every step; and Alexander’s great object was to husband his own strength until the Polar winter should set in around the strangers, and bring the miseries which he thus foresaw to a crisis.  Napoleon, on the other hand, had calculated on being met by the Russians at, or even in advance of, their frontier (as he had been by the Austrians in the campaigns of Austerlitz and Wagram, and by the Prussians in that of Jena); of gaining a great battle; marching immediately either to St. Petersburg or to Moscow—­and dictating a peace, after the fashion of Presburg or Schoenbrunn, within the walls of one of the Czar’s own palaces.

On the 24th of June, the grand imperial army, consolidated into three masses, began their passage of the Niemen; the King of Westphalia at Grodno; the Viceroy Eugene at Pilony, and Napoleon himself near Kowno.  The emperor rode on in front of his army to reconnoitre the banks; his horse stumbled, and he fell to the ground.  “A bad omen—­a Roman would return,” exclaimed some one; it is not certain whether Buonaparte himself or one of his attendants.  The first party that crossed were challenged by a single Cossack.  “For what purpose,” said he, “do you enter the Russian country?” “To beat you and take Wilna,” answered the advanced guard.  The sentinel struck spurs to his horse, and disappeared in the forest.  There came on at the same moment a tremendous thunder-storm.  Thus began the fatal invasion.

No opposition awaited these enormous hosts as they traversed the plains of Lithuania.  Alexander withdrew his armies deliberately as they advanced.  The capital itself, Wilna, was evacuated two days before they came in sight of it; and Napoleon took up his quarters there on the 28th of June.  But it was found that all the magazines, which Buonaparte had counted on seizing, had been burnt before the Russians withdrew, and the imperial bulletins began already to denounce the “barbarous method” in which the enemy seemed resolved to conduct his defence.

It was noticed in an early part of this narrative that Napoleon’s plan of warfare could hardly have been carried into execution on a great scale, unless by permitting the troops to subsist on plunder; and we have seen through how many campaigns the marauding system was adopted without producing any serious inconvenience to the French.  Buonaparte, however, had learned from Spain and Portugal how difficult it is for soldiers to find food in these ways, provided the population around them be really united in hostility against them.  He had further considered the vast distance