wn. If it does not
comfort you, it will amuse you. How sweet the orange bloom smells!
Listen:--Had not the war broke out so suddenly, I should have been
married, two months to a day, before the battle of Saarbruck. Catherine
was a distant cousin, beautiful and talented, about ten years my
junior. Before Heaven, sir, on the word of a gentleman, I never
persecuted her with my addresses, and if either of them ay I did, tell
them from me, sir, that they lie, and I will prove it on their bodies.
Bah! I was forgetting. I, as head of the family, was her guardian, and,
although my younger brother was nearer her age, I courted her, in all
honour and humility proposed to her, and was accepted with even more
willingness than most women condescend to show on such occasions, and
received the hearty congratulations of my brother. Few women were ever
loved better than I loved Catherine. Conceive, Cecil, that I loved her
as well as you love Miss Brentwood, and listen to what follows.

"The war-cloud burst so suddenly that, leaving my bride that was to be,
to the care of my brother, and putting him in charge over my property,
I hurried off to join the Landsturm, two regiments of which I had put
into a state of efficiency by my sole exertions.

"You know partly what followed,--in one day an army of 150,000 men
destroyed, the King in flight to Konigsberg, and Prussia a province of
France.

"I fled, wounded badly, desperate and penniless, from that field. I
learnt from the peasants, that what I had thought to be merely a
serious defeat was an irretrievable disaster; and, in spite of wounds,
hunger, and want of clothes, I held on my way towards home.

"The enemy were in possession of the country, so I had to travel by
night alone, and beg from such poor cottages as I dared to approach.
Sometimes got a night's rest, but generally lay abroad in the fields.
But at length, after every sort of danger and hardship, I stood above
the broad, sweeping Maine, and saw the towers of my own beloved castle
across the river, perched as of old above the vineyards, looking
protectingly down upon the little town which was clustered on the
river-bank below, and which owned me for its master.

"I crossed at dusk. I had to act with great caution, for I did not know
whether the French were there or no. I did not make myself known to the
peasant who ferried me over, further than as one from the war, which my
appearance was sufficient to prove. I landed just