(Vienna) would be worth fighting
for, if one had the chance. I sometimes amuse myself by planning a
siege, when I ride round the fortifications, as is my custom of an
afternoon."

In another, after telling me that he had been reading some books of
travel in Egypt and Central America, he said:--

"Next to a military life I think that of a traveller--a genuine
traveller, who turns his back upon railroads and guides--must be the
most exciting and the most enviable under heaven. Since reading these
books, I dream of the jungle and the desert, and fancy that a
buffalo-hunt must be almost as fine sport as a charge of cavalry. Oh,
what a weary exile this is! I feel as if the very air were stagnant
around me, and I, like the accursed vessel that carried the ancient
mariner,--

As idle as a painted ship,
Upon a painted ocean.'"

Sometimes, though rarely, he mentioned Madame de Courcelles, and then
very guardedly: always as "Madame de Courcelles," and never as his wife.

"That morning," he wrote, "comes back to me with all the vagueness of a
dream--you will know what morning I mean, and why it fills so shadowy a
page in the book of my memory. And it might as well have been a dream,
for aught of present peace or future hope that it has brought me. I
often think that I was selfish when I exacted that pledge from her. I do
not see of what good it can be to either her or me, or in what sense I
can be said to have gained even the power to protect and serve her.
Would that I were rich; or that she and I were poor together, and
dwelling far away in some American wild, under the shade of primeval
trees, the world forgetting; by the world forgot! I should enjoy the
life of a Canadian settler--so free, so rational, so manly. How happy we
might be--she with her children, her garden, her books; I with my dogs,
my gun, my lands! What a curse it is, this spider's web of civilization,
that hems and cramps us in on every side, and from which not all the
armor of common-sense is sufficient to preserve us!"

Sometimes he broke into a strain of forced gayety, more sad, to my
thinking, than the bitterest lamentations could have been.

"I wish to Heaven," he said, in one of his later letters--"I wish to
Heaven I had no heart, and no brain! I wish I was, like some worthy
people I know, a mere human zoophyte, consisting of nothing but a mouth
and a stomach. Only conceive how it must simplify life when once one has
succeeded in makin