not been back in this country a twelvemonth."

"Come in, monsieur," said the other, and he led the way to a
drawing-room on the ground-floor. Everything in the room showed signs of
capricious destruction.

Valuable china jars lay in fragments on either side of a clock beneath a
glass shade, which had escaped. The silk hangings about the windows were
torn to rags, while the muslin curtains were untouched.

"You see about you the havoc wrought by a charming being to whom I
have dedicated my life. She is my niece; and though medical science
is powerless in her case, I hope to restore her to reason, though the
method which I am trying is, unluckily, only possible to the wealthy."

Then, like all who live much alone and daily bear the burden of a heavy
trouble, he fell to talk with the magistrate. This is the story that he
told, set in order, and with the many digressions made by both teller
and hearer omitted.

When, at nine o'clock at night, on the 28th of November 1812, Marshal
Victor abandoned the heights of Studzianka, which he had held through
the day, he left a thousand men behind with instructions to protect,
till the last possible moment, the two pontoon bridges over the Beresina
that still held good. This rear guard was to save if possible an
appalling number of stragglers, so numbed with the cold, that they
obstinately refused to leave the baggage-wagons. The heroism of the
generous band was doomed to fail; for, unluckily, the men who poured
down to the eastern bank of the Beresina found carriages, caissons, and
all kinds of property which the Army had been forced to abandon during
its passage on the 27th and 28th days of November. The poor, half-frozen
wretches, sunk almost to the level of brutes, finding such unhoped-for
riches, bivouacked in the deserted space, laid hands on the military
stores, improvised huts out of the material, lighted fires with anything
that would burn, cut up the carcasses of the horses for food, tore out
the linings of the carriages, wrapped themselves in them, and lay
down to sleep instead of crossing the Beresina in peace under cover of
night--the Beresina that even then had proved, by incredible fatality,
so disastrous to the Army. Such apathy on the part of the poor fellows
can only be understood by those who remember tramping across those vast
deserts of snow, with nothing to quench their thirst but snow, snow for
their bed, snow as far as the horizon on every side, and no