e of his officers whispered something in his ear, and he quietly
added--

'I find that I had not used these words, but I ought to have done so;
give the message, therefore, as you heard it at first.'

'Mahon will shoot him, to a certainty,' muttered one of the captains.

'I'd not blame him,' joined another; 'that horse saved his life at
Quiberon, when he fell in with a patrol; and look at him now!'

The major made a sign for me to retire, and I turned and set ont towards
Nancy, with the feelings of a convict on the way to his fate.

If I did not feel that these brief records of a humble career were
'upon honour,' and that the only useful lesson a life so unimportant can
teach, is the conflict between opposing influences, I might possibly
be disposed to blink the avowal, that, as I rode along towards Nancy, a
very great doubt occurred to me as to whether I ought not to desert!
It is a very ignoble expression; but it must out. There were not in
the French service any of those ignominious punishments which, once
undergone, a man is dishonoured for ever, and no more admissible to rank
with men of character than if convicted of actual crime; but there were
marks of degradation, almost as severe, then in vogue, and which men
dreaded with a fear nearly as acute--such, for instance, as being
ordered for service at the Bagne de Brest, in Toulon--the arduous duty
of guarding the galley-slaves, and which was scarcely a degree above the
condition of the condemned themselves. Than such a fate as this, I
would willingly have preferred death. It was, then, this thought that
suggested desertion; but I soon rejected the unworthy temptation, and
held on my way towards Nancy.

Aleppo, if at first wearied by the severe burst, soon rallied, while he
showed no traces of his fiery temper, and exhibited few of fatigue; and
as I walked along at his side, washing his mouth and nostrils at each
fountain I passed, and slackening his saddle-girths to give him freedom,
long before we arrived at the suburbs he had regained all his looks and
much of his spirit.

At last we entered Nancy about nightfall, and, with a failing heart, I
found myself at the gate of the ducal palace. The sentries suffered me
to pass unmolested, and entering, I took my way through the courtyard,
towards the small gate of the garden, which, as I had left it, was
unlatched.

It was strange enough, the nearer I drew towards the eventful moment of
my fate, the more resol