this terrible conflict a cannon-ball fearfully mangled the horse upon which Napoleon was riding. The powerful animal, frantic with pain and terror, became perfectly unmanageable. Seizing the bit in his teeth, he rushed through the storm of bullets directly into the midst of the Austrian ranks. He then, in the agonies of death, plunged into the morass and expired. Napoleon was left struggling in the swamp up to his neck in the mire. Being perfectly helpless, he was expecting every moment either to sink and disappear in that inglorious grave, or that some Austrian dragoon would sabre his head from his body or with a bullet pierce his brain. Enveloped in clouds of smoke, in the midst of the dismay and the uproar of the terrific scene, he chanced to evade observation, until his own troops, regardless of every peril, forced their way to his rescue. Napoleon escaped with but a few slight wounds. Through the long day, the tide of war continued to ebb and to flow upon these narrow dykes. Napoleon now carefully counted the number of prisoners taken and estimated the amount of the slain. Computing thus that the enemy did not outnumber him by more than a third, he resolved to march out into the open plain for a decisive conflict. He relied upon the enthusiasm and the confidence of his own troops and the dejection with which he knew that the Austrians were oppressed. In these impassable morasses it was impossible to operate with the cavalry. Three days of this terrible conflict had now passed. In the horrible carnage of these days Napoleon had lost 8000 men, and he estimated that the Austrians could not have lost less, in killed, wounded, and prisoners, than 20,000. Both armies were utterly exhausted, and those hours of dejection and lassitude had ensued in which every one wished that the battle was at an end.

It was midnight. Napoleon, sleepless and fasting, seemed insensible to exhaustion either of body or of mind. He galloped along the dykes from post to post, with his whole soul engrossed with preparations for the renewal of the conflict. Now he checked his horse to speak in tones of consolation to a wounded soldier, and again by a few words of kind encouragement animated an exhausted sentinel. At two o'clock in the morning the whole army, with the ranks sadly thinned, was again roused and ranged in battle array. It was a cold, damp morning, and the weary and half-famished soldiers shivered in their lines. A dense, oppressive fog covered the flooded marsh and added to the gloom of the night. Napoleon ordered fifty of the guards to struggle with their horses through the swamp, and conceal themselves in the rear of the enemy. With incredible difficulty most of them succeeded in accomplishing this object. Each dragoon had a trumpet. Napoleon commenced a furious attack along the whole Austrian front. When the fire was the hottest, at an appointed signal, the mounted guards sounded with their trumpets loudly the charge, and with perfect desperation plunged into the ranks of the enemy. The Austrians, in the darkness and confusion of the night, supposing that Murat,[1] with his whole body of cavalry, was thundering down upon their rear, in dismay broke and fled. With demoniacal energy the French troops pursued the victory, and before that day's sun went down, the proud army of Alvinzi, now utterly routed, and having lost nearly thirty thousand men, marking its path with a trail of blood, was retreating into the mountains of Austria. Napoleon, with streaming banners and exultant music, marched triumphantly back into Verona, by the eastern gates, directly opposite those from which, three days before, he had emerged. He was received by the inhabitants with the utmost enthusiasm and astonishment. Even the enemies of Napoleon so greatly admired the heroism and the genius of this wonderful achievement, that they added their applause to that of his friends. This was the fourth Austrian army which Napoleon had overthrown in less than eight months, and each of them more than twice as numerous as his own. In Napoleon's dispatches to the Directory, as usual, silent concerning himself, and magnanimously attributing the victory to the heroism of the troops, he says, "Never was a field of battle more valiantly disputed than the conflict at Arcola. I have scarcely any generals left. Their bravery and their patriotic enthusiasm are without example."

In the midst of all these cares he found time to write a letter of sympathy to the widow of the brave Muiron. "You," he writes, "have lost a husband who was dear to you; and I am bereft of a friend to whom I have been long and sincerely attached. But our country has suffered more than us both, in being deprived of an officer so pre-eminently distinguished for his talents and his dauntless bravery. If it lies within the scope of my ability to yield assistance to yourself, or your infant, I beseech you to reckon upon my utmost exertions." It is affecting to record that in a few weeks the woe-stricken widow gave birth to a lifeless babe, and she and her little one sank into an untimely grave together. The woes of war extend far and wide beyond the blood-stained field of battle. Twenty thousand men perished around the marshes of Arcola. And after the thunders of the strife had ceased, and the groans of the dying were hushed in death, in twenty thousand distant homes, far away on the plains of France, or in the peaceful glens of Austria, the agony of that field of blood was renewed, as the tidings reached them, and a wail burst forth from crushed and lacerated hearts, which might almost have drowned the roar of that deadly strife.

How Napoleon could have found time in the midst of such terrific scenes for the delicate attentions of friendship, it is difficult to conceive. Yet to a stranger he wrote, announcing the death of a nephew, in the following affecting terms: "He fell with glory and in the face of the enemy, without suffering a moment of pain. Where is the man who would not envy such a death? Who would not gladly accept the choice of thus escaping from the vicissitudes of an unsatisfying world. Who has not often regretted that he has not been thus withdrawn from the calumny, the envy, and all the odious passions which seem the almost exclusive directors of the conduct of mankind." It was in this pensive strain that Napoleon wrote, when a young man of twenty-six, and in the midst of a series of the most brilliant victories which mortal man had ever achieved.