tacks from the
eastward, it will perhaps be necessary to repel efforts which may be made
from the west."

On the 20th of May, Napoleon, for the first time in his life, relinquished
an enterprise unaccomplished. An incessant fire was kept up in the
trenches till the last moment, while the baggage, the sick, and the field
artillery were silently defiling to the rear, so that the Turks had no
suspicion that the besiegers were about to abandon their works. Napoleon
left three thousand of his troops, slain or dead of the plague, buried in
the sands of Acre. He had accomplished the ostensible and avowed object of
his expedition. He had utterly destroyed the vast assemblages formed in
Syria for the invasion of Egypt, and had rendered the enemy, in that
quarter, incapable of acting against him. Acre had been overwhelmed by his
fire, and was now reduced to a heap of ruins. Those vague and brilliant
dreams of conquest in the East, which he secretly cherished, had not been
revealed to the soldiers. They simply knew that they had triumphantly
accomplished the object announced to them, in the destruction of the great
Turkish army. Elated with the pride of conquerors, they prepared to
return, with the utmost celerity, to encounter another army, assembled at
Rhodes, which was soon to be landed, by the hostile fleet, upon some part
of the shores of Egypt. Thus, while Napoleon was frustrated in the
accomplishment of his undivulged but most majestic plans, he still
appeared to the world an invincible conqueror.

There were, in the hospitals, twelve hundred sick and wounded. These were
to be conveyed on horses and on litters. Napoleon relinquished his own
horse for the wounded, and toiled along through the burning sands with the
humblest soldiers on foot. The Druses and other tribes, hostile to the
Porte, were in a state of great dismay when they learned that the French
were retiring. They knew that they must encounter terrible vengeance at
the hands of Achmet the Butcher. The victory of the allies riveted upon
them anew their chains, and a wail, which would have caused the ear of
Christendom to tingle, ascended from terrified villages, as fathers and
mothers and children cowered beneath the storm of vengeance which fell
upon them, from the hands of the merciless Turk. But England was too far
away for the shrieks to be heard in her pious dwellings.

At Jaffa, among the multitude of the sick, there were seven found near to
death. They we