for provisions.  They turned without ceremony the sleeping infants out of the baskets, and cared not how the enraged mothers lacerated their faces in return.  The scenes of horror changed so quickly, that you could not dwell more than half a minute upon any of them.  The tenderest heart became torpid and insensible.  One tale of woe followed on the heels of another,—­“Such a person too has been plundered!—­Such an one’s house has been set on fire!—­This man is cut in pieces; that has been transfixed with the bayonet!—­Those poor creatures are seeking their children!”—­These were the tidings brought by every new fugitive.  If you asked the French when the march would be over, you received the consolatory answer—­“Not before six o’clock in the morning.”  During the night the sound of drums and trumpets incessantly announced the arrival of fresh regiments.  At length, about midnight, the bustle somewhat subsided, at least so far as regarded the marching of troops.  I now seized the favourable moment, and felt myself as it were a new creature; when, having made my way through the crowd of horses with extraordinary courage and dexterity, I once more set foot in the city. Thus the morning and the evening completed the first day of horror.

Notwithstanding the unpleasant circumstances in which my curiosity had involved me on the preceding day, I had in fact seen and heard nothing as far as related to my principal object.  It was no battle, but merely an indecisive, though warm, affair.  The first act of the piece concluded with aft illumination extending farther than the eye could reach, and occasioned by the innumerable watch-fires which were kindled in every quarter, and gradually spread farther and farther, as the lines of the bivouacking army were lengthened by the arrival of fresh columns.  By way of variety, the flames rising from a number of burning houses in the distance formed as it were points of repose.  Scarcely was the night over when all eyes and ears were on the alert, in expectation that the sanguinary scene would commence with the morning’s dawn.  All, however, remained quiet.  People, therefore, again ventured abroad, and there thought themselves more secure than the preceding day, because they might the more easily avoid the danger while at a distance-than they could have done the night before.  It required, to be sure, considerable strength of nerves not to be shocked at the spectacles which every where presented themselves.  Many dead bodies of soldiers, who had come sick into bivouac, lay naked in the fields and upon the roads.  The heirs had taken especial care to be on the spot at the moment of their decease, to take possession of all that the poor wretches had to bequeath.  The mortality among the horses had been still greater:  you met with their carcasses almost at every step; and, which way soever you turned your eyes, you beheld a still greater number which Death had so firmly seized in his iron grasp, that