ll of bugle and trumpet and the wail of the melancholy pibroch:
tunics and gold tassels and kilts--a medley of sounds and of visions!

We see the attack on Hougoumont--the appearance of Buelow on the heights
of Saint Lambert--the charge of the Inniskillings and the Scots
Greys--the death of valiant Ponsonby. We see Marshal Ney Prince of
Moskowa--the bravest soldier in France--we see him everywhere where the
melee is thickest, everywhere where danger is most nigh. His magnificent
uniform torn to shreds, his gold lace tarnished, his hair and whiskers
singed, his face blackened by powder, indomitable, unconquered, superb,
we hear him cry: "Where are those British bullets? Is there not one left
for me?"

He knows--none better!--that the plains of Mont Saint Jean are the great
gambling tables on which the supreme gambler--Napoleon, once Emperor of
the French and master of half the world--had staked his all. "If we come
out of this alive and conquered," he cries to Heymes, his aide-de-camp,
"there will only be the hangman's rope left for us all."

And we see the gambler himself--Napoleon, Emperor still and still
certain of victory--on horseback all day, riding from end to end of his
lines; he is gayer than he has ever been before. At Marengo he was
despondent, at Austerlitz he was troubled: but at Waterloo he has no
doubts. The star of his destiny has risen more brilliant than ever
before.

"The day of France's glory has only just dawned," he calls, and his mind
is full of projects--the triumphant march back into Paris--the Germans
driven back to the Rhine--the English to the sea.

His only anxiety--and it is a slight one still--is that Grouchy with his
fresh troops is so late in arriving.

Still, the Prussians are late too, and the British cannot hold the place
for ever.

II

At three o'clock the fog lifts--the veil that has wrapped so many
sounds, such awful and wonderful visions, in a kind of mystery, is
lifted now, and it reveals . . . what? Hougoumont invested--Brave Baring
there with a handful of men--English, German, Brunswickians--making a
last stand with ten rounds of ammunition left to them per man, and the
French engineers already battering in the gates of the enclosing wall
that surrounds the chateau and chapel of Goumont: the farm of La Haye
Sainte taken--Ney there with his regiment of cuirassiers and five
battalions of the Old Guard: and the English lines on the heights of
Mont Saint Jean apparently