ges which
had been hurriedly smashed up to provide firewood. Carts, still laden
with the booty of Moscow, stood among the trees. Some of them contained
small square boxes of silver coin, brought by Napoleon to pay his army
and here abandoned. Silver coin was too heavy to carry. The rate of
exchange had long been sixty francs in silver for a gold napoleon or a
louis. The cloth coverings of the cushions had been torn off to shape
into rough garments; the straw stuffing had been eaten by the horses.

Inside the carriages were--crouching on the floor--the frozen bodies of
fugitives too badly wounded or too ill to attempt to walk. They had sat
there till death came to them. Many were women. In one carriage four
women, in silks and fine linen, were huddled together. Their furs had
been dragged from them either before or after death.

Louis stopped at the bottom and looked back. De Casimir at all events
had succeeded in surmounting this obstacle which had proved fatal to
so many--the grave of so many hopes--God's rubbish-heap, where gold
and precious stones, silks and priceless furs, all that greedy men had
schemed and striven and fought to get, fell from their hands at last.

Vilna lies all down a slope--a city built upon several hills--and the
Vilia runs at the bottom. That Way of Sorrow, the Smolensk Road, runs
eastward by the river bank, and here the rearguard held the Cossacks in
check while Murat hastily decamped, after dark, westwards to Kowno. The
King of Naples, to whom Napoleon gave the command of his broken army
quite gaily--"a vous, Roi de Naples," he is reported to have said, as he
hurried to his carriage--Murat abandoned his sick and wounded; did not
even warn the stragglers.

D'Arragon entered the city by the narrow gate known as the Town Gate,
through which, as through that greater portal of Moscow, every man must
pass bareheaded.

"The Emperor is here," were the first words spoken to him by the officer
on guard.

But the streets were quiet enough, and the winner in this great game
of chance maintained the same unostentatious silence in victory as that
which, in the hour of humiliation, had baffled Napoleon.

It was almost night, and D'Arragon had been travelling since daylight.
He found a lodging, and, having secured the comfort of the horse
provided by the lame shoemaker of Konigsberg, he went out into the
streets in search of information.

Few cities are, to this day, so behind the times as Vilna. T