Knowing my horse, I put him at the Emperor’s head, and Bugaboo went at it like a shot.  He was riding his famous white Arab, and turned quite pale as I came up and went over the horse and the Emperor, scarcely brushing the cockade which he wore.

“Bravo!” said Murat, bursting into enthusiasm at the leap.

“Cut him down!” said Sieyes, once an Abbe, but now a gigantic Cuirassier; and he made a pass at me with his sword.  But he little knew an Irishman on an Irish horse.  Bugaboo cleared Sieyes, and fetched the monster a slap with his near hind hoof which sent him reeling from his saddle,—­and away I went, with an army of a hundred and seventy-three thousand eight hundred men at my heels. * * * *

BARBAZURE.

By G. P. R. Jeames, Esq., Etc.

I.

It was upon one of those balmy evenings of November, which are only known in the valleys of Languedoc and among the mountains of Alsace, that two cavaliers might have been perceived by the naked eye threading one of the rocky and romantic gorges that skirt the mountain-land between the Marne and the Garonne.  The rosy tints of the declining luminary were gilding the peaks and crags which lined the path, through which the horsemen wound slowly; and as these eternal battlements with which Nature had hemmed in the ravine which our travellers trod, blushed with the last tints of the fading sunlight, the valley below was gray and darkling, and the hard and devious course was sombre in twilight.  A few goats, hardly visible among the peaks, were cropping the scanty herbage here and there.  The pipes of shepherds, calling in their flocks as they trooped homewards to their mountain villages, sent up plaintive echoes which moaned through those rocky and lonely steeps; the stars began to glimmer in the purple heavens spread serenely overhead and the faint crescent of the moon, which had peered for some time scarce visible in the azure, gleamed out more brilliantly at every moment, until it blazed as if in triumph at the sun’s retreat.  ’Tis a fair land that of France, a gentle, a green, and a beautiful; the home of arts and arms, of chivalry and romance, and (however sadly stained by the excesses of modern times) ’twas the unbought grace of nations once, and the seat of ancient renown and disciplined valor.

And of all that fair land of France, whose beauty is so bright and bravery is so famous, there is no spot greener or fairer than that one over which our travellers wended, and which stretches between the good towns of Vendemiaire and Nivose.  ’Tis common now to a hundred thousand voyagers:  the English tourist, with his chariot and his Harvey’s Sauce, and his imperials; the bustling commis-voyageur on the roof of the rumbling diligence; the rapid malle-poste thundering over the chaussee at twelve miles an hour—­pass the ground hourly and daily now:  ’twas lonely and unfrequented at the end of that seventeenth century with which our story commences.