ed:

"'If I slay thee, thou hireling dog, as I have often slain thy clodpated
countrymen in other days,' and the Frenchman laughed fiercely, 'by St.
Denis! I will have one foe-man less on this side of Hell!'

"'Gott in Himmel! ach! mein tuyvel! mein--mein Gott!' gasped the
Dutchman as he floundered beneath the heel of the vengeful and
infuriated Frenchman, who was determined on destroying him, till a blow
from the baton of an officer, stretched him almost senseless among the
snow, where he was immediately grasped by the trumpeters, disrobed of
his last remaining garment, and bound strongly to the halberts.

"Meanwhile the other prisoner had been pinioned and resolutely held by
his escort, otherwise he would undoubtedly have fallen also upon Van
Wandenberg, who choking with a tempest of passion that was too great to
find utterance in words, had gathered up his rotund figure, and with an
agility wonderful in a man of his years and vast obesity, so heavily
armed, in a buff coat and jack-boots ribbed with iron, a heavy sword and
cloak, clambered on the back of his horse, as a clown would climb up a
wall; and with a visage alternating between purple and blue, by the
effects of rage and strangulation, he surveyed the prisoner for a moment
in silence, and there gleamed in his piggish gray eyes an expression of
fury and pain, bitterness and triumph combined, and he was only able to
articulate one word--

"'Flog.'

"On the handsome young Frenchman's dark curly hair, glistening with the
whitening snow that fell upon it, and on his tender skin reddening in
the frosty atmosphere, on the swelling muscles of his athletic form, on
a half-healed sabre wound, and on the lineaments of a face that then
expressed the extremity of mental agony, fell full the wavering light of
the uplifted torches. The Dutch, accustomed to every species of
extra-judicial cruelty by sea and land, looked on with the most grave
stolidity and apathetic indifference; while I felt an astonishment and
indignation that rapidly gave place to undisguised horror.

"'_Flog!_'

"The other prisoner uttered a groan that seemed to come from his very
heart, and then covered his ears and eyes with his hands. Wielded by a
muscular trumpeter, an immense scourge of many-knotted cords was brought
down with one full sweep on the white back of the victim, and nine livid
bars, each red, as if seared by a hot iron, rose under the infliction,
and again the terrible instrument