I found telescopes, hygrometers, barometers, thermometers, and electrical machines, lying about in fragments.  The view of the town library filled me with lively concern.  The volumes were tossed about and defaced with the utmost wantonness; and, if they happened to bear any resemblance to Bibles, they were torn in pieces and trampled on.  The collection of natural curiosities next caught my eye.  Plants, seeds, dried birds, insects, and drawings were scattered about in great confusion, and some of the sailors were in the act of killing a beautiful musk-cat, which they afterwards ate.  Every house was full of Frenchmen, who were hacking, and destroying, and tearing up everything which they could not convert to their own use.  The destruction of live stock on this and the following day was immense.  In my yard alone they killed fourteen dozen of fowls, and there were not less than twelve hundred hogs shot in the town.”  It was unsafe to walk in the streets of Freetown during the forty-eight hours that followed its capture, because the French crews, with too much of the Company’s port wine in their heads to aim straight, were firing at the pigs of the poor freedmen over whom they had achieved such a questionable victory.

To readers of Erckmann-Chatrian it is unpleasant to be taken thus behind the curtain on which those skilful artists have painted the wars of the early Revolution.  It is one thing to be told how the crusaders of ’93 and ’94 were received with blessings and banquets by the populations to whom they brought freedom and enlightenment, and quite another to read the journal in which a quiet accurate-minded Scotchman tells us how a pack of tipsy ruffians sat abusing Pitt and George to him, over a fricassee of his own fowls, and among the wreck of his lamps and mirrors which they had smashed as a protest against aristocratic luxury.

“There is not a boy among them who has not learnt to accompany the name of Pitt with an execration.  When I went to bed, there was no sleep to be had on account of the sentinels thinking fit to amuse me the whole night through with the revenge they meant to take on him when they got him to Paris.  Next morning I went on board the ‘Experiment.’  The Commodore and all his officers messed together, and I was admitted among them.  They are truly the poorest-looking people I ever saw.  Even the Commodore has only one suit which can at all distinguish him, not to say from the officers, but from the men.  The filth and confusion of their meals was terrible.  A chorus of boys usher in the dinner with the Marseilles hymn, and it finishes in the same way.  The enthusiasm of all ranks among them is astonishing, but not more so than their blindness.  They talk with ecstasy of their revolutionary government, of their bloody executions, of their revolutionary tribunal, of the rapid movement of their revolutionary army with the Corps of justice and the flying guillotine before it; forgetting that not one of them is not liable to its