lept their last, and which so many of the sleepers were never to leave
with life. I then had the true experience of human passion. Love, in the
light and gay, may be as sportive as themselves; in the calm and grave,
it may be strong and deep; but in some, it is strong as tempest and
consuming as flame.

I should probably have closed my days in that place of all afflicting
sights and sounds, but for my good old Beguine. On her first visit at
dawn, she lectured me prodigiously on the folly of exposing myself to
the hazards of the night air, of which she evidently thought much more
than of the Austrian cannon-balls. "They might shower upon the buildings
as they pleased, but," said the Beguine, "if they kill, their business
is done. It is your cold, your damp, your night air, that carries off,
without letting any one know how," the perplexity of science on the
subject plainly forming the chief evil in poor Juliet's mind.

"See my own condition," said she, striving to bring her recollections in
aid of her advice. "At fifteen I was a barmaid at the Swartz Adler;
there I ran in and out, danced at all the family fetes, and was as gay
as a bird on the tree. But that life was too good to last. At twenty, a
corporal of Prussian dragoons fell in love with me, or I with him--it is
all the same. His regiment was ordered to Silesia, and away we all
marched. But if ever there was a country of fogs, that was the one.
There are, now and then, a few even in our delightful France; but, in
Silesia, they have a patent for them, they have them _par privilege_; if
men could eat them, there would never be a chance of starving in
Silesia. So we all got sore throats. Cannon and musketry were nothing to
them. Our dragoons dropped off like flies at the end of summer; and,
unless we had been ordered away to keep the Turks from marching to
Berlin, or the saints know where, the regiment would have had its last
quarters in this world within a league of the marshes of Breslau. So I
say ever since--take care of damp."

Having thus relieved her good-natured spirit of its burden, she
proceeded to give me sketches of her history. The corporal had fallen a
victim--though whether to Silesian fog, brandy, or bullet, she left
doubtful--and she had married his successor in the rank. Love and
matrimony in the army are of a different order from either in civil
life; for the love is perpetual, the matrimony precarious. Juliet
acknowledged that she never left abov