“See again! he found he was immortal.

“Sure of himself, knowing he must ever be THE EMPEROR, he went for a while to an island to study out the nature of these others, who, you may be sure, committed follies without end.  Whilst he bided his time down there, the Chinese, and the wild men on the coast of Africa, and the Barbary States, and others who are not at all accommodating, knew so well he was more than man that they respected his tent, saying to touch it would be to offend God.  Thus, d’ye see, when these others turned him from the doors of his own France, he still reigned over the whole world.  Before long he embarked in the same little cockleshell of a boat he had had in Egypt, sailed round the beard of the English, set foot in France, and France acclaimed him.  The sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; all France cried out with one voice, ‘LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!’ In this region, here, the enthusiasm for that wonder of the ages was, I may say, solid.  Dauphine behaved well; and I am particularly pleased to know that her people wept when they saw, once more, the gray overcoat.  March first it was, when Napoleon landed with two hundred men to conquer that kingdom of France and of Navarre, which on the twentieth of the same month was again the French Empire.  On that day our MAN was in Paris; he had made a clean sweep, recovered his dear France, and gathered his veterans together by saying no more than three words, ‘I am here.’

“’Twas the greatest miracle God had yet done!  Before him, did ever man recover an empire by showing his hat?  And these others, who thought they had subdued France!  Not they!  At sight of the eagles, a national army sprang up, and we marched to Waterloo.  There, the Guard died at one blow.  Napoleon, in despair, threw himself three times before the cannon of the enemy without obtaining death.  We saw that.  The battle was lost.  That night the Emperor called his old soldiers to him; on the field soaked with our blood he burned his banner and his eagles,—­his poor eagles, ever victorious, who cried ‘Forward’ in the battles, and had flown the length and breadth of Europe, they were saved the infamy of belonging to the enemy:  all the treasures of England couldn’t get her a tail-feather of them.  No more eagles!—­the rest is well known.  The Red Man went over to the Bourbons, like the scoundrel that he is.  France is crushed; the soldier is nothing; they deprive him of his dues; they discharge him to make room for broken-down nobles—­ah, ’tis pitiable!  They seized Napoleon by treachery; the English nailed him on a desert island in mid-ocean on a rock raised ten thousand feet above the earth; and there he is, and will be, till the Red Man gives him back his power for the happiness of France.  These others say he’s dead.  Ha, dead!  ’Tis easy to see they don’t know Him.  They tell that fib to catch the people, and feel safe in their hovel of a government.  Listen! the truth at the bottom