reprehensible for that great captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by raising in his breast a false hope of national independence.  It has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards of a hundred years on a diet of false hopes and—­well—­dog.  It is, when one thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen.  Some pride in the national constitution which has survived a long course of such dishes is really excusable.  But enough of generalising.  Returning to particulars, Mr. Nicholas B. confided to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his misanthropically laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been nearly “the death of him.”  This is not surprising.  What surprises me is that the story was ever heard of; for grand-uncle Nicholas differed in this from the generality of military men of Napoleon’s time (and perhaps of all time), that he did not like to talk of his campaigns, which began at Friedland and ended somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc.  His admiration of the great Emperor was unreserved in everything but expression.  Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a sentiment to be displayed before a world of little faith.  Apart from that he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he had hardly ever seen a soldier in his life.  Proud of his decorations earned before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear the ribbons at the buttonhole in the manner practised to this day in Europe and even was unwilling to display the insignia on festive occasions, as though he wished to conceal them in the fear of appearing boastful.  “It is enough that I have them,” he used to mutter.  In the course of thirty years they were seen on his breast only twice—­at an auspicious marriage in the family and at the funeral of an old friend.  That the wedding which was thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only late in life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas B., who made amends at my birth by a long letter of congratulation containing the following prophecy:  “He will see better times.”  Even in his embittered heart there lived a hope.  But he was not a true prophet.

He was a man of strange contradictions.  Living for many years in his brother’s house, the home of many children, a house full of life, of animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of many guests, he kept his habits of solitude and silence.  Considered as obstinately secretive in all his purposes, he was in reality the victim of a most painful irresolution in all matters of civil life.  Under his taciturn, phlegmatic behaviour was hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate anger.  I suspect he had no talent for narrative; but it seemed to afford him sombre satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride over the bridge of the river Elster after the battle of Leipsic.  Lest some construction favourable to his valour should be put on the fact he condescended to explain how it came to pass.  It seems that