madness of your distress, you tried again and again to
drown yourself, as if there were no God, no life after death, no power to
help in the Almighty; whose voice was it in your heart that bade you stop
each time, and bade you hope?

"And, as you lay on that sick bed, and your life trembled in the balance,
whose power was it that gave the turn to your distempered mind, instead
of dealing with you after your sin, and rewarding you after your
iniquity?"

Once more he paused. Then said in a yet lower tone of voice, almost in a
whisper, but with perfect naturalness, "And far, far above all, when we
were yet without strength, ungodly sinners, who was it signalized His
love towards us by dying for us on the cross?"

More passed between the two friends that night. But Cosin could elicit
no definite promise from the other. He only said, with great emotion, as
they parted,--

"Truest and best of friends, I shall think all night of these things."

And he did turn and twist about for hours in his berth, so that more than
once his fellow prisoners cried out angrily, "What _is_ the matter with
you, Tournier?" But he fell asleep towards morning, as soon as he had at
last made up his mind that Fontenoy might kill _him_ if he could, but he
himself would fire into the ground.

As he went out in the morning he met the chaplain. He stopped him and
said, "You are going, I see, to keep your appointment. Spare yourself
the trouble. Your enemy has been struck down by another hand than yours.
The Almighty has smitten him with paralysis. He is never likely to
recover."

But he _did_ recover; and so we take our leave of him with the greatest
possible pleasure.

CHAPTER IX.--PRISONERS EMANCIPATED.

The retreat of Napoleon, after the battle of Leipsic, was as disastrous
to him as his retreat from Moscow. On the 9th of November, 1813, he
reached Paris, and on the 21st of the following month the allied armies
crossed the Rhine, and carried the war into France. Soon after, the
English, under Wellington, defeated the French, under Soult--"the bravest
of the brave," in several engagements in the South of France, until the
knell of Napoleon's arms was sounded in the bloody battle of Toulouse,
fought on Easter Sunday, the 11th of April, 1814. Six days before the
battle, Napoleon had abdicated at Fontainebleau. If the electric
telegraph had been known in those days, all the lives lost in that
fearful fight might have been s