e whole train of fifty or sixty waggons, of which
about a tenth remained full, were hurried away at full gallop down to
the Boulevard, leaving the scaffold a sinecure. At the barrier a new
arrangement took place; the wounded were piled into the carriages along
with us, and the whole were marched under escort to the grand depot of
the garrison of Paris.

I had seen Vincennes before, and under trying circumstances; its
frowning physiognomy had not been altered, nor, as a prison, was it more
congenial to my feelings than before. Yet, on hearing the hollow tread
of our horses' feet over its drawbridge, and seeing myself actually
within its massive walls, I experienced a feeling of satisfaction which
I had never expected to enjoy within bolts and bars. In this world
contrast is every thing. I had been so fevered with alternate peril and
escape, so sick of doubt, and so perplexed with the thousand miseries of
flight; that, to find myself secure from casualty for the next
twenty-four hours, and relieved from the trouble of thinking for myself,
or thinking of any thing, was a relief which amounted almost to a
pleasure. I never laid myself down to sleep with greater thankfulness,
than when, stretched on the wooden guard-bed of the barrack-room, where
the whole crowd of prisoners were packed together, I listened to the
beat of the night-drum and the changing of the guard. They told me that,
for once at least, I might sleep without a police-officer, to bid me,
like Master Barnardine, "arise and be hanged."

Time in a garrison is the most lingering of all conceivable things,
except time in a prison. I had it, loaded with the double weight. There
was no resource to be found in the fractured and bandaged portion of
human nature round me. The Austrians were brave boors, who spoke nothing
but Styrian or Carinthian, or some border dialect, which nothing but
barbarism had ever heard of, and which nothing but Austrian organs could
have ever pronounced. The French recruits were from provinces which had
their own "beloved patois," and which, to the Parisian, held nearly the
same rank of civilized respect as the Kingdom of Ashantee. Besides, it
was to be remembered, that all round me was a scene of suffering--the
dismal epilogue of a field of battle; or rather the dropping of the
curtain on the royal stage, when the glitter and the noise were gone by,
and the actors reduced from their pomps and vanities, and sent home to
the shivering neces