highways of historical progress.  Other costs will come, if we are worthy; other lessons there will be to learn.  I anticipate a place for brave and wise restrictions,—­for I am no Red Republican,—­as well as for brave and generous expansions.  Lessons to learn, errors to unlearn, there will surely be; tasks to attempt, and disciplines to practise; but once place the nation in the condition of health, once get it at one with its own heart, once get it out of these aimless eddies into clear sea, out of these accursed “doldrums,” (as the sailors phrase it,) this commixture of broiling calm and sky-bursting thunder-gust, into the great trade-winds of natural tendency that are so near at hand,—­and I can trust it to meet all future emergency.  All the freshest blood of the world is flowing hither:  we have but to wed this with the life-blood of the universe, with eternal truth and justice, and God has in store no blessing for noblest nations that will not be secured for ours.

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THE CHASSEURS A PIED.

Among the most celebrated corps of the French army, one of the most conspicuous and remarkable is that peculiar body of troops to which has been given the name of Chasseurs a Pied, or Foot-Chasseurs, to distinguish it from an organization of mounted men in the same service, uniformed and trained on similar principles.  The Chasseurs a Pied have not attained the same romantic renown as that acquired by their brethren and rivals in arms, the Zouaves, but, nevertheless, they have had an exceedingly brilliant career in the late wars and conquests of France.  They possess their own characteristics of originality, too, and are, in many respects, one of the most efficient and formidable forces in existence.

In order to convey a clear and correct idea of the new principles adopted in the organization and equipment of the Chasseurs, and to furnish our readers with some facts that may be interesting to them as historical students, and most useful to such among them as are connected with or may have any aspiration for military life, we must beg them to go back with us, for a moment, to the very period of the invention of gunpowder.  It would be out of the question, of course, to attempt, in these pages, a description of all the curious weapons that were at first employed under the name of fire-arms.  We will only remark that such weapons were, despite the anathemas of Bayard and the sarcasms of Ariosto, very much used as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, and played an important part on the battle-fields of that epoch.