without officers, and officers found themselves without men. In this last case was Captain St. Arnaud, of the French regiment of Dufour, a young gentleman who had exchanged his commission in the King’s Musketeers, the most royal of all the royal guards, for a line regiment where he could see service. It cannot be denied that this decision on Captain St. Arnaud’s part surprised his world, for he was a curled darling among the ladies, and the most superlative dandy in Paris. And, wonderful to say, he still looked the superlative dandy on the afternoon of the coldest day he ever felt in his life, amid the snowy wastes [Pg 3]of Silesia, when, after two weeks of starving and running away from the Prussians, it looked as if the inevitable hour had come. There was, yet, not a speck upon his handsome uniform; his long, light hair lay in curls upon his shoulders—he had admired his own locks too much to cover them up with a periwig; and his delicate, handsome face, now gaunt and pale, was exquisitely shaven. Clearly, starving did not agree with his constitution. His whole life before that campaign had been spent in the courts and camps of kings, and he had missed those hardening and fortifying influences which is Fate’s rough way of benefiting her favorites. But faint and weak and hopeless as he seemed, his soul was still unconquered, and his eyes looked bravely around upon the desolate waste before him. The cold, already intense, was becoming severer every hour. St. Arnaud, being naturally of a reflective nature, which he hid under a mask of the utmost levity, was thinking to himself, as he patted the neck of his lean and patient horse, “The whole social order depends on the mercury in the tube. At a certain point, varying in different races, all distinctions are abolished. If my general were here this moment, I would be as good as he; for the best man would be he who [Pg 4]could keep up his circulation best. And if my orderly were here—bah! he could only deprive me of my last chance of living through this night by rubbing down my horse for me, which exercise would keep my blood in circulation and increase the poor beast’s chances of carrying me through to the end.” His piercing eyes had swept the view in front of him, but he almost jumped out of his saddle as a voice at his elbow said: “My Captain! I salute you!”

In

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