r than you
expected; the Churchyard, always fenced with high stone-and-mortar wall,
is usually the principal military post of the place. Mollwitz, at the
present day, has something of whitewash here and there; one of the
farmer people, or more, wearing a civilized prosperous look. The belfry
offers you a pleasant view: the roofs and steeples of Brieg, pleasantly
visible to eastward; villages dotted about, Laugwitz, Barzdorf,
Hermsdorf, clear to your inquiring: and to westward, and to southward,
tops of Hill-country in the distance. Westward, twenty miles off, are
pleasant Hills; and among them, if you look well, shadowy Town-spires,
which you are assured are Strehlen, a place also of interest in
Friedrich's History.--Your belfry itself, in Mollwitz, is old, but not
unsound; and the big iron clock grunts heavily at your ear, or perhaps
bursts out in a too deafening manner, while you study the topographies.
Pampitz, too, seems prosperous, in its littery way; the Church is bigger
and newer,"--owing to an accident we shall hear of soon;--"Country
all about seems farmed with some industry, but with shallow ploughing;
liable to drought. It is very sandy in quality; shorn of umbrage;
painfully naked to an English eye." That is the big champaign, coated
with two feet of snow, where a great Action is now to go forward.

Neipperg, all this while, is much at his ease on this white resting-day,
He is just sitting down to dinner at the Dorfschulze's (Village Provost,
or miniature Mayor of Mollwitz), a composed man; when--rockets or
projectiles, and successive anxious sputterings from the steeple-tops
of Brieg, are hastily reported: what can it mean? Means little
perhaps;--Neipperg sends out a Hussar party to ascertain, and composedly
sets himself to dine. In a little while his Hussar party will come
galloping back, faster than it went; faster and fewer;--and there will
be news for Neipperg during dinner! Better here looking out, though it
was a rest-day?--

The truth is, the Prussian advance goes on with punctilious exactitude,
by no means rapidly. Colonel Count van Rothenburg,--the same whom we
lately heard of in Paris as a miracle of gambling,--he now here, in a
new capacity, is warily leading the Vanguard of Dragoons; warily, with
the Four Columns well to rear of him: the Austrian Hussar party came
upon Rothenburg, not two miles from Mollwitz; and suddenly drew bridle.
Them Rothenburg tumbles to the right-about, and chases;--fin