. All the more merrily did the enemy's soldiers
carouse and enjoy themselves, laugh and joke. For them Berlin was
nothing more than an orange to be squeezed dry, whose life-blood was
to be drawn out to add new zest to their own draught of life.

The young Russian officers were sitting together in the large room
of their barracks. They were drinking and making merry, and striking
their glasses noisily together; draining them to the health of the
popular, handsome, and brilliant comrade who had just entered their
circle, and who was no other than he whom Gotzkowsky's daughter, in
the sorrow of her heart, was mourning as dead!--no one else than the
Russian colonel, Count Feodor von Brenda.

He had been right, therefore, in trusting to Fortune. Fortune had
favored him, as she always does those who boldly venture all to
win all, and who sport with danger as with a toy. Indeed, it was
an original and piquant adventure which the Russian colonel had
experienced, the more piquant because it had threatened him with
death, and at one moment his life had been in extreme danger. It had
delighted him for once to experience all the horrors of death, the
palpitation, the despair of a condemned culprit; to acquire in his own
person a knowledge of the great and overpowering feelings, which he
had read so much about in books, and which he had not felt in reality
even in the midst of battle. But yet this bold playing with death had,
toward the last, lost a little of its charm, and a moment arrived when
his courage failed him, and his daring spirit was overpowered by
his awed physical nature. There was not, as there is in battle, the
excitement which conquers the fear of death, and drunk with victory,
mocks one to his face; there was not the wild delight which possesses
the soldier in the midst of a shower of balls, and makes him, as it
were, rush toward eternity with a shout. No, indeed! It was something
quite different which Colonel von Brenda, otherwise so brave and
valiant, now felt.

When the Austrian soldiers had pronounced his sentence of death, when
they formed a ring around him at the Gens-d'Armes Market, and loaded
their pieces for his execution, then the haughty Russian colonel felt
a sudden change take place; his blood curdled in his veins, and
he felt as if thousands of small worms were creeping through them,
gliding slowly, horribly to his heart. At length, in the very despair
which oppressed him, he found strength to cast