hurrying in the twilight. I felt a
sudden shock, like that of electricity, which struck me down; I made a
struggle to rise on my feet, but my strength wholly failed me, and I
lost all recollection.

On my restoration to my senses, in a few hours after, I found that I had
been carried into the town, and placed in the military hospital. My
first impulse was, to examine whether any of my brave fellows had shared
my misfortune; but all round me were French, wounded in the engagement
of the day. My next source of congratulation was, that I had no limb
broken. The shot had struck me in the temple, and glanced off without
entering; but I had lost much blood, had been trampled, and felt a
degree of exhaustion, which gave me the nearest conception to actual
death.

Of the transactions of the field I knew nothing beyond my own share of
the day; but I had seen the enemy in full flight, and that was
sufficient. Within a day or two, the roaring of cannon, the increased
bustle of the attendants, and the tidings that a black flag had been
erected on the hospital, told me that the siege had begun. I shall pass
over its horrors. Yet, what is all war but a succession of horrors? The
sights which I saw, the sounds which I heard from hour to hour, were
enough to sicken me of human nature. In the gloom and pain of my
sleepless nights, I literally began to think it possible that a fiendish
nature might supplant the human condition, and that the work before my
eyes was merely an anticipation of those terrors, which to name startles
the imagination and wrings the heart. Surrounded with agonies, the
involuntary remark always came to my mind with renewed freshness, in the
common occurrences of the hospital day. But, besides the sufferings of
the wounded, a new species of suffering, scarcely less painful, and
still more humiliating, began to be prominent. The provisions of the
people, insufficiently laid in at the approach of the besiegers, rapidly
failed, and the hospital itself was soon surrounded by supplicants for
food. The distress, at last, became so excessive, that it amounted to
agony. Emaciated figures of both sexes stole or forced their way into
the building, to beg our rations, or snatch them from our feeble hands;
and I often divided my scanty meal with individuals who had once been in
opulent trade, or been ranked among the _semi-noblesse_ of the
surrounding country. Sometimes I missed faces to which I had been
accustomed among th