ur 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 ampl