Warsaw. Three regiments were sent off, the day after the battle of
Clissow, by boats down the Vistula, and then by ship to Revel. Mine
was one of them, but we arrived a fortnight too late."

"Then you were present at Charles' third victory? How that young
fellow handles his troops, and what wonderful troops they are! Now
we will get into our easy chairs again, and you shall tell me
something about what you have been doing, since we last met."

Charlie gave a sketch of his adventures.

"So you fought at the Dwina, too? You have had luck in going
through three battles without a wound."

When Charlie stated that he had gone to Warsaw on a private
mission, whose nature was immaterial to the story, the doctor broke
in:

"You need not tell me what it was, it was of course something to do
with Augustus. The way Charles is hunting down that unfortunate
king is shocking, it is downright malignity. Why, he has wasted
fifteen months over it already, and it has cost him Ingria. He
could have made any terms with Poland he liked, after his victory
on the Dwina, and would then have been free to use all his forces
against us. As it is, he has wasted two summers, and is likely to
waste another, and that not for any material advantage, but simply
to gratify his hatred against Augustus; and he has left us to take
Ingria almost without a blow, and to gain what Russia has wanted
for the last hundred years, a foothold on the Baltic. He may be a
great general, but he is no politician. No real statesman would
throw away solid advantages in order to gratify personal pique."

"He considers Augustus the author of this league against him,"
Charlie said. "He and the czar had no grounds at all of quarrel
against him."

"We talked over that, the last time we met," the doctor said with a
laugh, "and I told you then that a foothold on the Baltic was so
necessary to Russia, that she would have accepted the alliance of
the Prince of Darkness himself to get it. As to Augustus, I don't
defend him. He was ambitious, as I suppose most of us are. He
thought he saw an opportunity of gaining territory. He has found
that he has made a mistake, and will of course lose a province. But
Charles' persecution of him goes beyond all bounds. Never before
did a sovereign insist upon a nation consenting to dethrone its
king at his dictation.

"But go on with your story."

He listened without remark, until Charlie concluded.

"I wish you had been in our ser