Artillery College when he died in 1890. My brother Charles gave two sons to the army. Both, after serving in line regiments, entered the Indian Staff Corps. The elder, Charles, died of of typhoid fever, contracted in the Bolan Pass in 1885. The younger, Lionel, was killed at Manipur in 1891. Such, my dear Blackwood, is the record for which you have asked me. I have wandered away from the Salamanca letter; but perhaps this brief record of a family that has done its share of service for the State may not be without interest. In the three generations sprung from my grandfather, who was himself a soldier, we have given twelve officers to the army, including two generals; three to the navy, including an admiral; and four to the consular service. We have, among us, taken part in the following campaigns: the Peninsular war (nine general actions), the Sikh war, the Crimean war, the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, the Ashanti war, the Zulu campaign, the Egyptian campaign of 1882, the Nile expedition of 1884-85, and various campaigns on the Indian frontier. Two have been killed in action, two have died of disease incidental to active service, one was invalided from wounds. And the pity of it is that in the next generation there is no representative of the family in either service. Nor, thanks to early marriages, large families, and service almost exclusively in professions which, however honourable, are not lucrative, is there an acre of land left to us. Let us hope that those families to whom the lands have passed may give as many loyal servants to the Crown as did that which has lost them. In that case there will be less to regret in this decay of an old family.-Believe me, my dear Blackwood, yours most sincerely, HENRY BRACKENBURY. THE SWORD OF CORPORAL LACOSTE. ""Tis many a wise Man's hap, while he is providing against one Danger, to fall into another: And for his very Providence to turn his Destruction." CORPORAL LACOSTE-cuirassier in the following of Murat, the Rupert of an Imperial army --had had a long dream, chiefly of a roaring thunder of surf bursting upon jagged rocks. And, as the storm of water thrashed the very pinnacles that toppled into mist, he had seen the ribs of cliff laid bare and bleeding-as it were the laceration of a living land that he looked on. Then, "Corne et tonnerre!" he had seemed to cry to himself, "the very world is torn by some inhuman power, and flows to the sea in rivers of purple!" and he heard the bells of the ocean, receding innumerably, choke at their moorings, muffled and congested with the floating scum of carnage that no wind might ruffle and only God's fire cleanse. Now, in a moment, he saw that what he had taken for land was in truth a great cliff built up of human bodies vast reserve of human force accumulated by, and for the use of, a single dominant will. And this cliff was washed by the waves of an ocean of blood, to which its life contributed in a thousand spouting rivulets. And it was compact of limitless pain; and the cry of torture never ceased within it. And suddenly the dreamer-as in the way of dreams-felt himself to be a constituent agony of that he gazed upon-a pulp of suffering self-contained, yet partaking of the wretchedness of all. Suddenly there was a faint stir and pushing here and there into the mound, a quiet soft heaving such as a mole makes; and whenever this ceased a moment, a shriek, thin as a needle, pierced the very nerve of the mass. And, with horror indescribable, the dreamer felt the approach of the thing, testing and feeling at one point or another, until it reached and entered his breast. "Hideous and unnameable!" he would have screamed, but clinched his teeth upon the cry; for, lo! it was but a little familiar hand, plump and white, that groped within his ribs, seeking to find and snap the tendons that held his heart in place. Then he found voice, and whispered in his extremity, "Spare me, my Emperor !" but the hand neither shook nor hurried, severing his chords of being one by one, until it could lift the heart from its socket and fling it to the waves that leapt like wolves beneath. And, at the instant of the lifting, it was as if a tooth of flame were thrust into him and withdrawn ; and thereafter he fell coldcolder, waxing blithe and painless, until he was moved to laugh to himself with a secret ecstasy of applause. "A good soldier has no heart. Of a truth le p'tit caporal must now as always have his way. And he has done it so deftly that I scarce feel a wound." The very association of the word seemed to open his eyes, morally and physically. Immediately he was conscious of a slit of blinding daylight; of the grip upon some exposed parts of his body of a frost sharp enough to hold him by the legs like a man-trap. Yet, save for these partial seizures, he appeared to be reclining under a blanket so suffocatingly thick that he could not account for his certain conviction that the heat was slowly retiring from it. All in a moment he had comprehended, and was struggling to relieve himself of his incubus. It rolled from him as he emerged from under it. It fell ridiculously into the caricature of a dead dragoon. Corporal Lacoste knew the thing for a mess-sergeant of his late acquaintance. He nodded to the body as he sat himself down in the snow. "Thou never servedst a comrade so well before, sergeant," said he; and, indeed, he would surely have died of the frost in his wound had not this unconscious trooper given him of the heat of his own vitality. to get glimpse of his own right shoulder. There was a sensation of wet numbness thereabouts. Something had pricked him pretty deeply-possibly the point of the very murderous weapon that had finished off the dragoon. "It was when I dreamt of the tooth of flame," thought Corporal Lacoste. "There have been vampires here amongst the wounded.' It hardly troubled him, this familiar experience. Those of Murat's hated beaux sabreurs who fell alive and had the misfortune to be left for dead, must always run the risk of mutilation. It was enough for him that the blow that had prostrated him had failed of its deadliness; that his senseless condition had not been made by the frost everlasting; that he owed his salvation to the accidental superimposition of a wounded dragoon. He took his dazed head between his hands, as he sat, and indulged a little retrospect of the events that had preceded his downfall, as he dwelt upon the scene before him. That was marvellous enough to a Gascon. He crouched in the bed of a precipitous defile that joined higher and lower terraces of the Amstetten forest. Beneath him, the gully went down with a rush of trampled snow, in the swirl of which dead horses and men and the wreck of accoutrements, half - buried in a foam of white, seemed the very freebooty of a frost-stricken waterfall. It was a strange picture of furious motion held in suspension-the more won derful for its framing. For the beaux sabreurs down Of the stunning effectiveness of these icicles, as a species of natural artillery, Corporal Lacoste had had a recent demonstration. His mind now was slowly electrotyping, in the midst of a clearing obscurity, certain images impressed upon it during the moments antecedent to his collapse. He recalled the weird long ride through forest vaults so roofed with snow that the world had seemed one vast tent propped by countless poles. He recalled how here and there a sluice of sunlight pouring through a rift overhead had reminded him of that strange Roman Pantheon that he had once seen when serving in the military suite of M. Barthollet, the appraiser of works of art to the Directory. He recalled how, jingling blithely in his saddle, in the wake of his swashbuckler general, with all the glory of the late capitulation of Ulm tingling in his careless heart, he had started to the sudden shout, the recoiling shock of ambush; and had seen and heard the outlet of this very glen, down which Murat and his advance-guard were riding, clank to the wheel of an Austrian regiment, that shut upon it like a gate of steel. He re membered the thunderous rush that succeeded-the charge of the defile the crash, the retreat, the rally; and again he saw the young artillery officer — some cadet inconnu-gallop his two pieces into position, and, at the critical moment, discharge his buzzing canisters of grape into the welter of the enemy. Corne et tonnerre! what a clearing of the pass! It had been like cleaning a pipe-stem with a fizz of gunpowder. But, at the same time, a catastrophe quite unexpected had resulted. For the explosion had brought down a very avalanche of snow and icicles from the weighted branches a hundred feet above; and these terrific bolts, bursting as it were in a cloud of smoke, had salvoed on helmet and breastplate of friend and foe alike, with a sound like the clanging of enormous cymbals, and had hurled horses and men in one shouting ruin to the ground. And it was precisely at this point that Corporal Lacoste's perceptions had been severed, and so left for the night as clean-ended as a pack of straw in a chaff-cutter. But destiny-his particular Atropos-was now to turn at the knife again-for a time. "To be floored by an icicle!" he muttered, twirling his fierce moustache. "Corne et tonnerre! it is after all a weapon unknown to courage and passion. This Queen of the snow is a barbarous fighter. Yet all night she kisses the wounds of her victims that they may not bleed. She woos to her embraces by the twin snares of hurt and pity. It is an amiable artifice, not unfamiliar to the experience of us that ply the sword. Whom a woman strikes she loves. My faith-but she was a chill bed - fellow, nevertheless!" He was feeling now very sick. His wounds, opening to his returned vitality, were beginning to run afresh. He rose and looked about for his helmet. It lay, a mere crushed tin kettle, under the dead dragoon. his sword was flung aside uninjured, and this he recovered and slipped back into its scabbard. But 'It retires with a hiss. Mon Dieu, what a poisonous snake!" he said; and then he took off his neckcloth and fastened it about his battered head. It was while he was thus engaged that his vision, wandering afield, rested on a figure that moved at the far end of the glen. This figure that appeared to be the only thing living in all the length of the pass-had an odd appearance to the dim eyes of the corporal. It was squat, and of fantastic garb and gesture; and to his weak exalted perceptives it presented itself as a gnome, crept, like a hound from the womb of sin, out of some icy dark crypt of the forest. Now and again it would stoop; now and again fling a goblin dance; and then all of a sudden it seemed to catch sight of the tall shape standing high in the lift of the defile, and stopped motionless and shaded its forehead with horizontal palm. Now, in a moment it appeared to set an extinguisher on its head, literally, as if subduing an unholy flame; and im mediately it came up the glen with a quick elastic step, the cone standing back at a rakish angle. The creature drew near. "Beaucoup de bruit pour rien!" muttered Corporal Lacoste, with a rallying twinge of self-contempt, for the thing had resolved itself into nothing more formidable than a little fat monk in a cowl; and "Bénédicité, mon père," he added, as a concession to a certain traditional superstition that yet affected him. "My cap is already doffed, or I would pull it off to your reverence," he said, leavening his grace with a pinch of mockery. "But-corne et tonnerre! I am forgetting. You will only converse in your own detestable tongue." "I know a little French," said the monk, promptly. "C'est bien," cried the soldier, but without surprise; for, indeed, he could not comprehend how one could speak any other language from choice. "And what was my father doing down there?" he asked. "And why did he dance?" The monk had steady little brown eyes, of the shape and fulness of a rabbit's. His face was round, ruddy, and extremely dirty; his chin peaked and under-hung; his stomach shaped like a case-bottle, but a hogshead in capacity. He had on a hooded cassock, the original black of which had paid a fine interest of coppery blotches to the investors of trinkgeld in that hallowed paunch; and he was altogether a very typical example, it must be admitted, |