I have cried many tears over eyes that were shut for me, but I’ve never been sorry that I came hither.

At last, no more wings came flying over the prairie.  Saul came home without food.  That was ten days ago.  He carried me the next morning to the village, to leave me there, till he should return,—­then retraced the ten miles through the snow, and went for food.

I stayed until there was no more for the children to eat.  I could not abide that, and this morning I stole away.  I’ve come the ten miles through the snow to light the fire, that Saul may not pass by, and go on to the town this cold night.  Where is he now?  Not perishing, dying on the prairie, as I was once, when he found me?  I’ll walk and see.  It is so lone outside, there is such an awful sound in the voice of stillness, and Saul is not in sight!

Where is my life now?  Since Saul went away, so much of it has gone, I feel as if more of myself were there than here.  Why couldn’t I go on thinking?  It was such relief!  The moon is up at last.  A low rumble over the dried grass, like a great wave treading on sand.  I am faint.  I have tightened my dress, to keep out hunger, every hour of this day.  Those starving children!  God pity them!  A higher wave of sound,—­surely ’tis not fancy.  I will look out.  The moon shines on a prairie sail, a gleam of canvas.  Another roll of the broad wheel, and Saul is here.

“Send the man on quickly,” I cried; “the children are starving in the town.”

“And you?” said Saul.

The power of his eyes is almost gone.  I scarcely heed them.  I see—­a bag of meal.

NAPOLEON THE THIRD

On the 6th of October, 1840, a young man was brought up for sentence in one of the highest courts of Europe, before which he had been tried, and by which he had been found guilty of one of the greatest crimes that can be charged upon any human being, though the world seldom visits it with moral condemnation.  The young man was Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the court was the French Chamber of Peers, and the sentence was imprisonment for life.  Had the French government of that day felt strong enough to act strongly, the condemned would have been treated as the Neapolitans treated Murat, and as the Mexicans treated Yturbide.  He would have been perpetually imprisoned, but his prison would have been “that which the sexton makes.”  But the Orleans dynasty was never strong, and its head was seldom able to act boldly.  To execute a Bonaparte, the undoubted heir of the Emperor, required nerve such as no French government had exhibited since that day on which Marechal Ney had been shot; and there were seven hundred thousand foreign soldiers in France when that piece of judicial butchery was resolved upon.  The army might not be ready to join a Bonaparte, but it could not be relied upon to guard the scaffold on which he should be sent