f Constantinople or of India. If we succeed in taking
this paltry town, I shall obtain the treasures of the Pacha, and arms for
three hundred thousand men. I will then raise and arm the whole population
of Syria, already so exasperated by the cruelty of Achmet, and for whose
fall all classes daily supplicate Heaven. I shall advance on Damascus and
Aleppo. I will recruit my army, as I advance, by enlisting all the
discontented. I will announce to the people the breaking of their chains
and the abolition of the tyrannical governments of the Pachas. The Druses
wait but for the fall of Acre, to declare themselves. I am already offered
the keys of Damascus. My armed masses will penetrate to Constantinople,
and the Mussulman dominion will be overturned. I shall found in the East a
new and mighty empire, which will fix my position with posterity."

With these visions animating his mind, and having fully persuaded himself
that he was the child of destiny, he prosecuted, with all possible vigor,
the siege of Acre. But English and Russian and Turkish fleets were in that
harbor. English generals, and French engineers, and European and Turkish
soldiers, stood, side by side, behind those formidable ramparts, to resist
the utmost endeavors of their assailants, with equal vigor, science, and
fearlessness. No pen can describe the desperate conflicts and the scenes
of carnage which ensued. Day after day, night after night, and week after
week, the horrible slaughter, without intermission, continued. The French
succeeded in transporting, by means of their cruisers, from Alexandria, a
few pieces of heavy artillery, and the walls of Acre were reduced to a
pile of blackened ruins. The streets were plowed up, and the houses blown
down by bomb-shells. Bleeding forms, blackened with smoke, and with
clothing burnt and tattered, rushed upon each other, with dripping sabres
and bayonets, and with hideous yells which rose even above the incessant
thunders of the cannonade. The noise, the uproar, the flash of guns, the
enveloping cloud of sulphurous smoke converting the day into hideous
night, and the unintermitted flashes of musketry and artillery,
transforming night into lurid and portentous day, the forms of the
combatants, gliding like spectres, with demoniacal fury through the
darkness, the blast of trumpets, the shout of onset, the shriek of death,
presented a scene which no tongue can tell nor imagination conceive. There
was no time to bury th