ings, and streaming pennants, and ravishing music.
The island of Isola Bella, or _Beautiful Island_, with its arcades, its
hanging gardens, and its palace of monkish gloom, was Napoleon's
favorite landing-place. Here they often partook of refreshments, and
engaged with all vivacity in rural festivities. It is stated that, while
enjoying one of these excursions, Josephine, with one or two other
ladies, was standing under a beautiful orange-tree, loaded with fruit,
with the attention of the party all absorbed in admiring the beauties of
the distant landscape. Napoleon, unperceived, crept up the tree, and by
a sudden shake brought down quite a shower of the golden fruit upon the
ladies. The companions of Josephine screamed with affright and ran from
the tree. She, however, accustomed to such pleasantries, suspected the
source, and remained unmoved. "Why, Josephine!" exclaimed Napoleon, "you
stand fire like one of my veterans." "And why should I not?" she
promptly replied, "am I not the wife of their commander?"

[Illustration: ISOLA BELLA.]

Napoleon, during these scenes of apparent relaxation, had but one
thought--ambition. His capacious mind was ever restless, ever excited,
not exactly with the desire of personal aggrandizement, but of mighty
enterprise, of magnificent achievement. Josephine, with her boundless
popularity and her arts of persuasion, though she often trembled in view
of the limitless aspirations of her husband, was extremely influential
in winning to him the powerful friends by whom they were surrounded.

The achievements which Napoleon accomplished during the short Italian
campaign are perhaps unparalleled in ancient or modern warfare.

With a number of men under his command ever inferior to the forces of
the Austrians, he maneuvered always to secure, at any one point, an
array superior to that of his antagonists. He cut up four several armies
which were sent from Austria to oppose him, took one hundred and fifteen
thousand prisoners, one hundred and seventy standards, eleven hundred
and forty pieces of battering cannon and field artillery, and drove the
Austrians from the frontiers of France to the walls of Vienna. He was
every where hailed as the liberator of Italy; and, encircled with the
pomp and the power of a monarch, he received such adulation as monarchs
rarely enjoy.

The Directory in Paris began to tremble in view of the gigantic strides
which this ambitious general was making. They surroun