ds Switzerland. We went forward in the
same track.

It is strange, after an interval of time, to look back on a period, which,
though short in itself, appeared, when in actual progress, to be drawn out
interminably. By the end of July we entered Dijon; by the end of July those
hours, days, and weeks had mingled with the ocean of forgotten time, which
in their passage teemed with fatal events and agonizing sorrow. By the end
of July, little more than a month had gone by, if man's life were measured
by the rising and setting of the sun: but, alas! in that interval ardent
youth had become grey-haired; furrows deep and uneraseable were trenched in
the blooming cheek of the young mother; the elastic limbs of early manhood,
paralyzed as by the burthen of years, assumed the decrepitude of age.
Nights passed, during whose fatal darkness the sun grew old before it rose;
and burning days, to cool whose baleful heat the balmy eve, lingering far
in eastern climes, came lagging and ineffectual; days, in which the dial,
radiant in its noon-day station, moved not its shadow the space of a little
hour, until a whole life of sorrow had brought the sufferer to an untimely
grave.

We departed from Versailles fifteen hundred souls. We set out on the
eighteenth of June. We made a long procession, in which was contained every
dear relationship, or tie of love, that existed in human society. Fathers
and husbands, with guardian care, gathered their dear relatives around
them; wives and mothers looked for support to the manly form beside them,
and then with tender anxiety bent their eyes on the infant troop around.
They were sad, but not hopeless. Each thought that someone would be saved;
each, with that pertinacious optimism, which to the last characterized our
human nature, trusted that their beloved family would be the one
preserved.

We passed through France, and found it empty of inhabitants. Some one or
two natives survived in the larger towns, which they roamed through like
ghosts; we received therefore small encrease to our numbers, and such
decrease through death, that at last it became easier to count the scanty
list of survivors. As we never deserted any of the sick, until their death
permitted us to commit their remains to the shelter of a grave, our journey
was long, while every day a frightful gap was made in our troop--they
died by tens, by fifties, by hundreds. No mercy was shewn by death; we
ceased to expect it, and every day