ary field, in the hottest
speed. The note he bore was as follows:

"Remove from Berlin with the royal family. Let the archives be
carried to Potsdam, and the capital make conditions with the
enemy."

As night approached, Frederic assembled the fragments of his army,
exhausted and bleeding, upon some heights, and threw up redoubts for
their protection. Twenty thousand of his troops were left upon the
field or in the hands of the enemy. Every cannon he had was taken.
Scarcely a general or an inferior officer escaped unwounded, and a
large number of his most valuable officers were slain. It was an awful
defeat and an awful slaughter.

Fortunately for Frederic the losses of the Russians had also been so
terrible that they did not venture to pursue the foe. Early the next
morning the Prussian king crossed the Oder; and the Russians,
encumbered with the thousands of their own mutilated and dying troops,
thought it not prudent to march upon Berlin. The war still raged
furiously, the allies being inspirited by hope and Frederic by
despair. At length the affairs of Prussia became quite hopeless, and
the Prussian monarch was in a position from which no earthly energy or
sagacity could extricate him. The Russians and Austrians, in
resistless numbers, were spread over all his provinces excepting
Saxony, where the great Frederic was entirely hemmed up.

The Prussian king was fully conscious of the desperation of his
affairs, and, though one of the most stoical and stern of men, he
experienced the acutest anguish. For hours he paced the floor of his
tent, absorbed in thought, seldom exchanging a word with his generals,
who stood silently by, having no word to utter of counsel or
encouragement. Just then God mysteriously interposed and saved Prussia
from dismemberment, and the name of her monarch from ignominy. The
Empress of Russia had been for some time in failing health, and the
year 1762 had but just dawned, when the enrapturing tidings were
conveyed to the camp of the despairing Prussians that Elizabeth was
dead. This event dispelled midnight gloom and caused the sun to shine
brightly upon the Prussian fortunes.

The nephew of the empress, Peter III., who succeeded her on her
throne, had long expressed his warm admiration of Frederic of Prussia,
had visited his court at Berlin, where he was received with the most
flattering attentions, and had enthroned the warlike Frederic in his
heart as the model of a her