peculiarities, it was the rest of us that were mere men. He
hears this history of France after his famous battle of Aboukir,
where with a single division he routed the grand army of the Turks,
twenty-five thousand strong, and jostled more than half of them into the
sea, rrrah! without losing more than three hundred of his own men. That
was his last thunder-clap in Egypt. He said to himself, seeing that all
was lost down there, 'I know that I am the saviour of France, and to
France I must go.'

"But you must clearly understand that the army did not know of his
departure; for if they had, they would have kept him there by force to
make him Emperor of the East. So there we all are without him, and in
low spirits, for he was the life of us. He leaves Kleber in command,
a great watchdog who passed in his checks at Cairo, murdered by an
Egyptian whom they put to death by spiking him with a bayonet, which
is their way of guillotining people out there; but he suffered so much,
that a soldier took pity on the scoundrel and handed his flask to him;
and the Egyptian turned up his eyes then and there with all the pleasure
in life. But there is not much fun for us about this little affair.
Napoleon steps aboard of a little cockleshell, a mere nothing of a
skiff, called the _Fortune_, and in the twinkling of an eye, and in the
teeth of the English, who were blockading the place with vessels of the
line and cruisers and everything that carries canvas, he lands in France
for he always had the faculty of taking the sea at a stride. Was that
natural? Bah! as soon as he landed at Frejus, it is as good as saying
that he has set foot in Paris. Everybody there worships him; but he
calls the Government together.

"'What have you done to my children, the soldiers?' he says to the
lawyers. 'You are a set of good-for-nothings who make fools of other
people, and feather your own nests at the expense of France. It will not
do. I speak in the name of every one who is discontented.'

"Thereupon they want to put him off and to get rid of him; but not a bit
of it! He locks them up in the barracks where they used to argufy and
makes them jump out of the windows. Then he makes them follow in his
train, and they all become as mute as fishes and supple as tobacco
pouches. So he becomes Consul at a blow. He was not the man to doubt the
existence of the Supreme Being; he kept his word with Providence, who
had kept His promise in earnest; he sets up religi