But there was a movement among the enemy. An officer, glittering with
orders, and another in a gray coat and a cocked hat, came to the wall,
and I recognized the Emperor Napoleon and the famous Joachim Murat.

"We are hardly pressed, methinks," Napoleon said sternly. "I must
exercise my old trade as an artilleryman;" and Murat loaded, and the
Emperor pointed the only hundred-and-twenty-four-pounder that had not
been silenced by our fire.

"Hurray, Killaloo boys!" shouted I. The next moment a sensation of
numbness and death seized me, and I lay like a corpse upon the rampart.


II.


"Hush!" said a voice, which I recognized to be that of the Marquis d'
O'Mahony. "Heaven be praised, reason has returned to you. For six weeks
those are the only sane words I have heard from you."

"Faix, and 'tis thrue for you, Colonel dear," cried another voice, with
which I was even more familiar; 'twas that of my honest and gallant
Lanty Clancy, who was blubbering at my bedside overjoyed at his master's
recovery.

"O musha, Masther Phil agrah! but this will be the great day intirely,
when I send off the news, which I would, barrin' I can't write, to
the lady your mother and your sisters at Castle Fogarty; and 'tis his
Riv'rence Father Luke will jump for joy thin, when he reads the letther!