s.

The reader may recollect a most picturesque murder near Manchester, about
thirteen or fourteen years ago, perpetrated by two brothers named McKean,
where a servant woman, whose throat had been effectually cut, rose up,
after an interval, from the ground at a most critical moment, (so critical,
that, by that act, and at that second of time, she drew off the murderer's
hand from the throat of a second victim,) staggered, in her delirium, to
the door of a room where sometime a club had been held, doubtless under
some idea of obtaining aid, and at the door, after walking some fifty feet,
dropped down dead. Not less astonishing was the resurrection, as it might
be called, of an English corporal, cut, mangled, remangled, and left
without sign of life. Suddenly he rose up, stiff and gory; dying and
delirious, as he felt himself, with misery from exhaustion and wounds, he
swam rivers, threaded enemies, and moving day and night, came suddenly
upon an army of Kandyans; here he prepared himself with pleasure for the
death that now seemed inevitable, when, by a fortunate accident, for want
of a fitter man, he was selected as an ambassador to the English officer
commanding a Kandyan garrison--and thus once more escaped miraculously.

Sometimes, when we are thinking over the great scenes of tragedy through
which Europe passed from 1805 to 1815, suddenly, from the bosom of utter
darkness, a blaze of light arises; a curtain is drawn up; a saloon is
revealed. We see a man sitting there alone, in an attitude of alarm and
expectation. What does he expect? What is it that he fears? He is
listening for the chariot-wheels of a fugitive army. At intervals he
raises his head--and we know him now for the Abbe de Pradt--the place,
Warsaw--the time, early in December 1812. All at once the rushing of
cavalry is heard; the door is thrown open; a stranger enters. We see, as
in Cornelius Agrippa's mirror, his haggard features; it is a momentary
king, having the sign of a felon's death written secretly on his brow; it
is Murat; he raises his hands with a gesture of horror as he advances to M.
l'Abbe. We hear his words--_"L'Abbe, all is lost!"_

Even so, when the English soldier, reeling from his anguish and weariness,
was admitted into the beleaguered fortress, his first words, more homely
in expression than Murat's, were to the same dreadful purpose--"Your
honour," he said, "all is dished;" and this being uttered by way of
prologue, he then deli