not

in custody." Then, turning to Carlo, "Sir, I must really beg a thousand pardons for having intruded myself into your presence; but I was aware of your rank or your wrongs." The general laughed again, and the adjutant echoed it, but without disturbing a muscle of his iron physiognomy.

Carlo's indignation had now given way to a sense of his circumstances, and he now repeated his question in a more moderated tone.

The general looked at him with a stern eye. "Well played, sir, I confess. You are a clever person, and act simplicity with a remarkably natural air. I confess I was taught to expect something of this; but I acknowledge that you surpass even your description. Pray, sir, what and who are you?”

Carlo's astonishment at this contempt was unbounded. He made a stride or two towards the general. The adjutant made one step in advance, as if to be in readiness for the support of his principal in the coming collision. But the collision came not. The flame was exhausted, and the un fortunate aid-de-camp, after a moment's struggle with himself, sank on his seat in utter exhaustion. The general's suspicions were only the more awakened.

"So, sir," said he, "you reverse the usual system. You give us the farce first and the tragedy after. But come, lay aside these follies, which can never impose on men of sense, and let me hear what you have to say for yourself. What! still speechless. Adjutant, hand me the report from the etat-major of the Archduke.

The adjatant produced the paper, and read with a voice as precise as if every syllable came by beat of drum.

"Carlo Sebastiani, Imperial Hulan, ordered into the custody of the major general commanding the imperial for tress of Erlach-Glaringen, on charge of being a French spy.'

Carlo gave a cry of wrath, like a roused tiger.

The inflexible adjutant went on:→ "He is charged with the several offences of having acted as guide to the enemy in their passage of the Rhine, of having betrayed the regi ment of Imperial Hulans into an am bush, from which nothing but the valour of the men and the consummate skill of their colonel saved them from

ruin; and thirdly, with having forged an order from the commander-inchief, by which the safety of the Swabian contingent was compromised, and several brave battalions, with their general, lost to the army.”

The unfortunate hearer's first feel ing was utter surprise; his ears rang with strange sounds, the light left his eyes, his limbs tottered, and, but for grasping at the table, he must have fallen on the ground. But he had a fund of vigour in his mind, which had not been called forth in the life of routine which he had hitherto led. Circumstances in this world do every thing, and he now began to find the use of difficulty.

"By whom has that paper been signed?" he asked, in a resolute tone. "By Ludwig Banstetten, major on the staff of his Highness," pronounced the adjutant.

A light flashed across Carlo's mind. He remembered to have heard the little corporal, in his vanity, tell some camp stories of his exploits under assumed names, and among these one in which Ludwig Banstetten figured with great effect. Why he had resumed a name which made discovery possible, was not easily to be accounted for; but the distinct recollection of the physiognomy which glanced on him from among the group following the Archduke, convinced him that he had fixed on the true author of his ill fortune. Yet why should his ruin have been necessary? A second thought settled this difficulty, like the former. Carlo had in his possession the secret which would have hanged the corporal. The evidence of his having been in French pay, was too plainly furnished by the skirmish on the banks of the Rhine; and of course it was the Frenchman's object to defer his own hanging, by putting Carlo in his place if possible.

Nothing could be clearer to the prisoner's conceptions, and nothing more eloquently argued on the spot; yet he failed of convincing the gover nor. The despatch from headquarters was, to that gallant though not very brilliant personage, like the law of the Medes and Persians, perfectly in controvertible. The idea that Major Banstetten, the favourite officer of the favourite general of Austria, could be a Frenchman and a spy besides, seem ed altogether ludicrous; and the old

man bade him good-night with a look that implied no slight doubt of the state of his brain.

Still the conference had produced à its effect. The prisoner's ardour and vividness of feeling were novelties among the inmates of a German bastion. The eloquent force with which he pressed his points, exceedingly puzzled the major-general, who was more positive than profound; and the manly and classic nobleness of his countenance, strongly assisted the influence which the interview was be. ginning to establish for him in the weatherbeaten sensibilities of the old commandant of himself and his dungeon.

All this was visible in the next interview. The interval was brief-it took place next afternoon. The gen. eral came with an open letter in his hand. His step was now slow, and his look wholly the reverse of the bluff buoyancy of the day before.

"I am come, young man," said he, upon a duty which I wish I could have avoided. I might have done it, it is true, by other hands; but it struck me, that, bad as the news is, you might feel even still more uncomfortably in hearing from one of my officers. You have fortitude enough to hear it like a man."

Carlo declared himself ready to receive any intelligence that would elucidate his extraordinary detention.

"The despatch, young man, is simply an order that you should be brought before a garrison court-martial to-morrow."

“General, I am ready this moment; but I must not die disgraced. I demand that General Von Staringer be summoned to my trial. He knows my conduct in the attack on the French columns. He will clear me of the infamous charge of having led him into misfortune."

"You shall have all the advantages which the court can give; but Count Staringer's testimony is not available. He has been carried prisoner into France with his officers.'

“Then, at least, can I not lay my statement before the Archduke? He is honourable; he will not suffer the son of his old friend to die the death of a felon!" exclaimed the prisoner. "Ay, there, young man, I must tell you fairly, that nothing is to be hoped for. The letters which I have recei

ved this morning on your case, state that the Archduke is more indignant at that part of the game which you have played than all the rest; but I waste time. Undone as you are, and by your own fault, I feel a kind of compassion for one forfeiting his life so early; with your appearance and intelligence, you might have risen to something."

The old man's voice dropped, and he turned away for a moment.

Carlo clasped his hand in strong emotion.

"General," said he, "I thank you for this sympathy. I have no friends, and as little hope. The world and I have no more to do with each other; yet," he recollected himself, "can it be denied that I brought a French prisoner of rank to headquarters, that on him I took an important despatch, and that this service ought to free me from the odious charge of a traitor ?"

The general's pale visage flushed. He rose from his seat, and paced the narrow apartment with angry strides.

"Young man," said he, " I felt some interest in you, from your plausibility at our first interview; but you have now extinguished every thing of the kind. You knew well what you were doing when you introduced that scoundrel to headquarters. You knew that he was the chief of the enemy's staff, and expressly sent to be taken. He was not twenty-four hours in the camp when he began to play his tricks with the Archduke's secretaries-contrived to get possession of some secrets of the highest importance to the future success of the campaign—and, with the fool whom he had corrupted, managed to make his escape just five minutes before he was to have been hanged."

Carlo stood, the picture of blank despair, cold and silent, with his eyes fixed above.

Ay, I knew that you could not say a word to this. Well, you are right," remarked Von Sharlheim. "Keep what you have to say for to-morrow. You will want all your plausibility before it is over." He hurried from the cellat the words, and rushed down the stairs. The adjutant, imperturbable as ever, locked the door with the air of a machine, and followed him. Carlo sat down to write a farewell letter to his mother.

How long he remained engaged in

this last work of his feelings on this side of the great chasm which separates us from the strange, the obscure, - and the terrible beyond, he knew not; but the twilight at length put a stop to his task, and he sat in that half waking, half sleep, which so often succeeds violent emotion. He was aroused by a voice singing a little Styrian air under his casement. There was something in the sound which so touchingly contrasted with his forlorn condition, that for the first time he burst into tears. But he was to be touched still more keenly. The song ceased, and he heard another voice speaking to the minstrel. He knew it at the instant-he would have known it at the extremity of the earth. was the voice of Carolina Cobentzel.

It

There are some conceptions which are absolutely indescribable by language. They crowd the mind with sensations of which it is itself unable to distinguish either the effect or the cause. The mind seems for the moment transported from the frame, into a new state of being: all is rapturous, tender, wild; yet all is confused. Carlo, for the time, forgot his cell, his misfortunes, the strange fatality which turned every thing for him into evil. He was again free, again in the pursuit of glory, again listening to the exquisite accents of Carolina's story. He saw, in all the darkness of his rude and melancholy den, the matchless features of a countenance which was to him like a spell. She was his world; all the rest was nothing.

This delirium, the delightful illusion of the heart awaking the fancy, at length subsided, and he began to think that all was a dream; but the voices commenced again. The moon had risen over the forest in her glory, and he heard one of Schiller's noble hymns to The Night, sung to the accompaniment of a tasteful and practised hand. The harp had scarcely ceased its chords, when a note from his casement was sent floating on the air. Whether it was ever to reach its address was doubtful; but it contained his "dying request" to know by what chance the only being for whom the earth was still dear to him had come within the fortress; and his hope that "she, at least, would judge him incapable of

dishonour."

The serenity of the evening was a faithless representative of the night

that followed. Before Carlo closed his casement, where he lingered, lost in sweet and bitter thoughts, till the moon went down, heavy gusts an nounced a storm; streaks of distant lightning tinged the clouds in the west, and the faint yet incessant roar of the thunder, told him that the tempest was busy among the crests of the Vosges. But it was probably to be his last night, and, to prepare his mind to act decorously on his last day, he threw himself upon the mattress and tried to sleep.

But he had that on his spirit which banishes sleep; and his memory traced nothing but the brilliant loveliness of Carolina, and heard nothing but the silver tones of her voice.

The storm had, by this time, crossed the Rhine, and was rolling over the forest country. The bellowings of the blast were tremendous; and the lightnings showed every corner of his dungeon with fearful distinctness. Yet in one of the pauses he conceived that other sounds reached his ear: he listened; there evidently were feet moving on the roof of the tower. As his eye turned to the casement, he now saw a heavy rope swinging across it, and in another moment a figure of a man, visible by a flash. He was totally without resource. To force open the grating was as impossible as to burst the door. But nothing could be plainer than that the enemy were in league with some traitors in the garrison; and it occurred to him, that some of the workmen employed in repairing the fortifications might have come to their labours before daylight. But, on touching his repeater, its little bell struck three. This was too early for honest employment, and he listened again. The rope descended, and he observed that a large open barrel was attached to it. His ear, sharpened by suspicion, too, heard low voices at the foot of the tower. He now glanced at the forest, and a glimpse of the lightning showed him a compact body of troops fixed closely under a cluster of the superb elms, which lined the road to the gate of the fortress. The rope began to move upwards again, and from the slowness of its motion it evidently bore a heavy burden. All these circumstances conspired to prove that some treachery was on foot, and that the troops whom he had seen were intended to take the garrison by

surprise. There was evidently no time to be lost. The door of the tower was bolted and barred, and all hope of arousing the fortress in that quarter vain: it was beyond calculation that, if they were suffered to make their way good to the tower, they must be masters of the bastion below, which gave them direct entrance into the body of the place. The fortress was evidently unprepared for this midnight assault; not a sound was heard, not a sentinel challenged. A French battalion, once let in, would evidently take the whole garrison in their beds. All feelings but those of soldiership were forgotten in this crisis, and he felt his frame breathless, from the anxiety to discover some means of arousing the devoted governor and his people. He recollected that a sentinel had been stationed during the day at the foot of his stair, and to him he cried out, with all the exertion of a remarkably sonorous voice. But the storm was too loud for him, or the sentinel was stupified with his pipe, which morning, noon, and night, alike finds in the yellow-haired lips of this most smoke-dried of all nations.

No man who has not experienced some such dilemma, can have an adequate conception of the fever to which anxiety may be wrought. Carlo utterly forgot how indifferent all this, and the world along with it, might be to him within the next twenty-four hours: he even forgot how much better his chance of existence might be, by falling into the hands of a French battalion than of a German judge-advocate. Every thing was forgotten but that the fortress was on the point of being surprised, and that Carolina Cobentzel was among its inmates, and exposed to the horrors of such scenes. Still, what was to be done? He felt along the walls of his apartment, as if he could have opened some fissure in them, and struggled into the open air. He again struck violently on the door. It was as massive as iron, and as inexorable. He rushed, for the tenth time, to the grating. Every instant was now big with fate. He saw the troops below emerging from their shelter, and evidently preparing to take advantage of the work of their comrades above. He flung himself in utter exhaustion, and with a pang like an icebolt through his heart, upon the floor, and covered

NO. CCXCV, VOL. XLVII.

He

his head with his hands, that he might shut out the horrid sounds of the assault, if possible. As he bowed his burning forehead to the ground, it struck upon something that glittered in the lightning: it was the knife which had carved his melancholy meal, and which, from having fallen under the table, had been forgotten by the old grenadier, whose orders were to leave nothing that had an edge within reach of his prisoner. Carlo caught it up with an involuntary ex clamation of joy. He sprang to the casement, the rope was again slowly moving upwards, and, by the tardiness of its motion, it evidently carried a heavier burden than before. On glancing down he saw two shakos ascending. He thrust his arm out to its full length, between the bars, and made a cut at the rope. He heard a cry, but the blow had been ineffectual; the windlass still creaked above. made a second blow, and one half of the rope instantly flew up, the other went down with its cargo, and a crash and a yell told him the fate of the unlucky experimentalists. He next heard the sentinel on the adjoining bastion challenge and fire. The relief which he experienced in that moment, was like waking from the pressure of some overwhelming disease. He breathed freely once more: he knew that the garrison was, at least, awake. The patrol of the night soon came hurrying along the ramparts: his door was unlocked, and the officer ordered his apartment to be examined. Their first alarm was thus directed to himself, and his supposed dexterity in making his escape from justice. This difficulty settled, the patrol were about to move forward when Carlo told the officer what he had seen. But the gallant captain, a sullen coxcomb, and angry at being called from the comforts of his guard-house only to be drenched to the skin, turned a contemptuous glance upon him: all would have been lost but for the coming up of the old adjutant, who halted the patrol until he heard the story. His presence at the interviews of the governor with Carlo had given him an opinion of the prisoner's sagacity, which was not to be shaken by the scowl of a half-sleepy captain, only eager to get back to his bottle. adjutant was a soldier, and had heard of French contrivances before. He

2 T

The

returned into the chamber-saw for himself the movement of shakos and the glitter of bayonets under the trees was satisfied that it was no affair to be dreamed over, and despatched the intelligence to the governor's quarters. But Carlo had by this time come out upon the rampart, and he heard sounds which convinced him that some portion of the enemy had already made their way within the place.

"I must make the rounds within fifteen minutes, and report to the governor," said the adjutant, with military precision.

"Give me but five of those minutes, and as many of the guard, and I shall ascertain the point," said Carlo, almost with a look of supplication.

"Well, then, I shall go with you," and the model of discipline strode onward.

The German finances are never in the most brilliant order, and if the honest Margraves and Serene Highnesses have enough for the routine of their little courts, the most monotonous little specimens of live machinery on the globe-an allowance sufficient to keep up an orchestra-for every German in existence is either a blower of the trombone, or longs to be a blower of it; and if the revenue can be stretched out so far as to include the sustenance of a pack of wild-boar hounds. and hunters, and a cellar of hock to wash down the dust of the summer's day sun, all the longings of sovereignty are satisfied. It is not to be a matter of astonishment, therefore, that the German frontier has never offered more resistance to a French invasion, than the twigs of a hamper of apples would do to the assaults of a legion of hungry schoolboys. To patch fortifications was the last employment to which the kreutzers and rixdollars were ever regarded as applicable; and there were more breaches than gates in every fortress from the Netherlands to Hungary. Erlach-Glaringen had shared only the common fate, and nothing but the Gallic love of stratagem had tempted them to the circuitous trouble of bribing some knave of the garrison, when their chance would have been better by a dash in noonday.

But we have no time for detail. This night was not destined to add to the laurels of the grande nation. The patrol, in winding its way among the ruins and repairs of the works, found

the unlucky hero who had made his solitary way by the windlass to the roof of the tower, and had been scared from his position by the tremendous tintimarre which Carlo had raised. A German bayonet was already at his breast, and his history would have been shortened but for his throwing himself, as if by instinct, at the knees of the only one of the party who would have thought of turning his life to any purpose. It struck the quick thought of the young son of Italy that he might lay a trap for the cunning of the enemy in turn; and he ordered the prisoner to follow him. He was promptly obeyed, and the whole party proceeded to the sallyport. Carlo had now obtained over his German comrades that sort of ascendancy which, in awkward times, is so readily conceded to whoever will take the perilous part of the affair upon himself. The view beyond the moat was certainly the reverse of satisfactory; for the occasional flashes, which still burst from the clouds as they swept along, almost touching the ground, showed a deep mass of caps and bayo nets already in the glacis, and evidently waiting only for the first opportunity to push across.

The adjutant pre

pared to draw up his little patrol, and give them a grand discharge. He was dragged back by his companion.

"Fly to the governor's quarters,” whispered Carlo," and leave me to manage in your absence. Awake the old general, and tell him that, if we are not the most unlucky dogs on earth, we shall have a handsome exhibition for the morning's parade. I pledge myself for a battalion at the least."

The adjutant flew; it was the first time that glory had cast a single ray on his dreary course of a quarter of a century: the prospect of promotion made him a new man, and if it had been but daylight, the whole garrison would have been in amazement at the rapidity with which he threaded the streets, rushed over the bodies of sleeping aids-de-camp and orderlies in the governor's house, and stood at the bedside of the great func< tionary himself, to tell him, as Hector's ghost told the Trojan hero, that he had better abandon dreaming for a while, and think of beating the enemy.

The heavy tramp of the garrison