it grieves me to tell
That this organ of smell
As stiff as an icicle froze.

Soon after, in sneezing, "_ker-choo_,"
His nose into smithereens flew,
And left but a stump,
A ridiculous lump,
That even in summer looked blue.

The frost-bitten man of Montrose
Used words that were equal to blows;
And so great his disgrace,
He soon quitted the place,
And where he has gone no one knows.

"THE BRAVEST OF THE BRAVE."

In the small but strongly fortified town of Saar-Louis, on what was then
the borders of France, in Rhenish Prussia, there was born, a little more
than a hundred years ago, a child whose future intrepid career earned
for him the title of "the bravest of the brave." His father's trade was
nothing more warlike than that of a cooper; his home life and training
were not different from those of many of his playmates; and yet before
he was sixteen years old he had entered a regiment of hussars, or light
cavalry, and before he was thirty had attained the high rank of general
of division.

But those were warlike days; the French Revolution had just begun; all
Europe was echoing with the clash and tread of such armies as the world
had never before seen; and living as he did in the shadow of
fortifications constructed by France's greatest military engineer,
Vauban, it is not so strange that the youth became filled with an
intense desire to taste the glory and share the danger of a soldier's
life.

Michael Ney, Marshal of France, Duke of Elchingen, Prince of Moskwa--for
by all these titles, commemorative of some one or other of his numerous
victories, was he known--early rose in the confidence and estimation of
the great Napoleon, and was by him intrusted with the most responsible
commands in Switzerland, Prussia, Austria, and Spain; and it was not
until he met Wellington at Torres Vedras, in the Peninsula, that he met
his superior in the art of war; and even then, by a happy mixture of
courage and skill, Ney was enabled to mitigate to a great extent the
bitterness of defeat. But to relate his whole career would be to fill a
volume, so we will only consider one or two incidents in his life.

In 1810, Ney took an active part in the invasion of Russia, and by his
address and energy contributed largely to the French victory at the
battle of the Moskwa, called by the Russians the battle of Borodino.

When the Russian Bear turned upon the invader, and the ever-memorable
retr