, and said to him, "There are four
and twenty handsome maids, General."

Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before
him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed
to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.
All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty
pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large
tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing
themselves, he said, "It is a pity."

Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for
his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of
the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during
the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the
evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the
guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls
rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at
Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the
heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless
projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his
horse' feet stood. Scabra rubigine. A few years ago, a shell of sixty
pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb,
was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his
guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the
saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister
and tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll get
yourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines has
himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over
the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the
oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which
parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.

Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the
plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place,
are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this
mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief
has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her
bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifyi