“Soon, alas, yes!” said Blanche; “there are only a few lines left.”  And she proceeded: 

“Thus, my dear, loving Eva, if this journal should ever reach its destination, you will be able to satisfy Dagobert as to the position of his wife and son, whom he left for our sakes.  How can we ever repay such a sacrifice?  But I feel sure, that your good and generous heart will have found some means of compensation.

“Adieu!—­Again adieu, for to-day, my beloved Eva; I left off writing for a moment, to visit the tent of Djalma.  He slept peacefully, and his father watched beside him; with a smile, he banished my fears.  This intrepid young man is no longer in any danger.  May he still be spared in the combat of to-morrow!  Adieu, my gentle Eva! the night is silent and calm; the fires of the bivouac are slowly dying out, and our poor mountaineers repose after this bloody day; I can hear, from hour to hour, the distant all’s well of our sentinels.  Those foreign words bring back my grief; they remind me of what I sometimes forget in writing—­that I am faraway, separated from you and from my child!  Poor, beloved beings! what will be your destiny?  Ah! if I could only send you, in time, that medal, which, by a fatal accident, I carried away with me from Warsaw, you might, perhaps, obtain leave to visit France, or at least to send our child there with Dagobert; for you know of what importance—­But why add this sorrow to all the rest?  Unfortunately, the years are passing away, the fatal day will arrive, and this last hope, in which I live for you, will also be taken from me:  but I will not close the evening by so sad a thought.  Adieu, my beloved Eva!  Clasp our child to your bosom, and cover it with all the kisses which I send to both of you from the depths of exile!”

“Till to-morrow—­after the battle!”

The reading of this touching letter was followed by long silence.  The tears of Rose and Blanche flowed together.  Dagobert, with his head resting on his hand, was absorbed in painful reflections.

Without doors, the wind had now augmented in violence; a heavy rain began to beat on the sounding panes; the most profound silence reigned in the interior of the inn.  But, whilst the daughters of General Simon were reading with such deep emotion, these fragments of their father’s journal, a strange and mysterious scene transpired in the menagerie of the brute-tamer.

CHAPTER IX.

The cages.

Morok had prepared himself.  Over his deer-skin vest he had drawn the coat of mail—­that steel tissue, as pliable as cloth, as hard as diamonds; next, clothing his arms and legs in their proper armor, and his feet in iron-bound buskins, and concealing all this defensive equipment under loose trousers and an ample pelisse carefully buttoned, he took in his hand a long bar of iron, white-hot, set in a wooden handle.