ible wound--he had just
given himself he did not feel the approach of death, and not wishing to
fall alive into the hands of the servants who were running in, he rushed
to the staircase. The persons who were invited were just coming in;
they, seeing a young man, pale and bleeding with a knife in his breast,
uttered loud cries, and stood aside, instead of stopping him. Sand
therefore passed down the staircase and reached the street below; ten
paces off, a patrol was passing, on the way to relieve the sentinels at
the castle; Sand thought these men had been summoned by the cries that
followed him; he threw himself on his knees in the middle of the street,
and said, "Father, receive my soul!"

Then, drawing the knife from the wound, he gave himself a second blow
below the former, and fell insensible.

Sand was carried to the hospital and guarded with the utmost strictness;
the wounds were serious, but, thanks to the skill of the physicians who
were called in, were not mortal; one of them even healed eventually; but
as to the second, the blade having gone between the costal pleura and the
pulmonary pleura, an effusion of blood occurred between the two layers,
so that, instead of closing the wound, it was kept carefully open, in
order that the blood extravasated during the night might be drawn off
every morning by means of a pump, as is done in the operation for
empyaemia.

Notwithstanding these cares, Sand was for three months between life and
death.

When, on the 26th of March, the news of Kotzebue's assassination came
from Mannheim to Jena, the academic senate caused Sand's room to be
opened, and found two letters--one addressed to his friends of the
Burschenschaft, in which he declared that he no longer belonged to their
society, since he did not wish that their brotherhood should include a
man about to die an the scaffold. The other letter, which bore this
superscription, "To my nearest and dearest," was an exact account of what
he meant to do, and the motives which had made him determine upon this
act. Though the letter is a little long, it is so solemn and so antique
in spirit, that we do not hesitate to present it in its entirety to our
readers:--

"To all my own "Loyal and eternally cherished souls

"Why add still further to your sadness? I asked myself, and I hesitated
to write to you; but my silence would have wounded the religion of the
heart; and the deeper a grief the more it needs, before it can be