to tender back to her the bitter cup of humiliation. The unaccustomed
sound of hostile cannon broke in on the dreams of invincibility which
had entranced the people, and deeds of violence and blood, which had
been complacently regarded when the theatre of action was on foreign
territory, seemed quite another thing when the scene was shifted to
their own vineyards and villages.

The genius of Napoleon never exhibited such vast fertility of resources
as when he battled for life and empire in his own dominions. Every foot
of ground was wrested from him at an expense of life which thinned the
innumerable hosts pressing onward to his destruction. He stood at bay
against all Europe in arms; and so desperately did he contend against
the vast odds opposed to him, and so rapidly did he move from one
invading column to another, successively beating back division upon
division, that his astonished foes, awed by his superhuman exertions,
had wellnigh turned their faces to the Rhine in panic-stricken retreat.
But the line of invasion was so widely extended that even his ubiquity
could not compass it. His wonderful power of concentration was of little
avail to him when the mere skeletons of regiments answered to his call,
and, along his weakened line, the neglected gleanings left by the
conscription, now hastily garnered in this last extremity, greeted him
in the treble notes of childhood. The voices of the bearded men, which
once hailed his presence, were hushed in death. They had shouted his
name in triumph over Europe, and it had quivered on their lips when
parched with the moral agony. Their bones were whitening the sands of
Egypt, the harvests of Italy had long waved over them, their
unnumbered graves lay thick in the German's Fatherland, and
the floods of the Berezina were yet giving up their unburied
dead. The remnant of that once invincible army did all that
could be done; but there were limits to endurance, and exhaustion