Take care of your watches! Pickpockets!

FIRST ATTACHE

Good. That relieves the monotony a little.

[Excitement in the throng. When it has subsided the band strikes
up a country dance, and stewards with white ribbons and laurel
leaves are seen bustling about.]

SECOND ATTACHE

Let us go and look at the dancing. It is "Voulez-vous danser"--no,
it is not,--it is "Enrico"--two ladies between two gentlemen.

[They go from the alcove.]

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

From this phantasmagoria let us roam
To the chief wheel and capstan of the show,
Distant afar. I pray you closely read
What I reveal--wherein each feature bulks
In measure with its value humanly.

[The beholder finds himself, as it were, caught up on high, and
while the Vauxhall scene still dimly twinkles below, he gazes
southward towards Central Europe--the contorted and attenuated
ecorche of the Continent appearing as in an earlier scene, but
now obscure under the summer stars.]

Three cities loom out large: Vienna there,
Dresden, which holds Napoleon, over here,
And Leipzig, whither we shall shortly wing,
Out yonderwards. 'Twixt Dresden and Vienna
What thing do you discern?

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

Something broad-faced,
Flat-folded, parchment-pale, and in its shape
Rectangular; but moving like a cloud
The Dresden way.

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Yet gaze more closely on it.

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

The object takes a letter's lineaments
Though swollen to mainsail measure,--magically,
I gather from your words; and on its face
Are three vast seals, red--signifying blood
Must I suppose? It moves on Dresden town,
And dwarfs the city as it passes by.--
You say Napoleon's there?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

The document,
Sized to its big importance, as I told,
Bears in it formal declaration, signed,
Of war by Francis with his late-linked son,
The Emperor of France. Now let us go
To Leipzig city, and await the blow.

[A chaotic gloom ensues, accompanied by a rushing like that of a
mighty wind.]

ACT THIRD

SCENE I

LEIPZIG. NAPOLEON'S QUARTERS IN THE REUDNITZ SUBURB

[The sitting-room of a private mansion. Evening. A large stove-
f