have dedicated my life. She is my niece; and though medical science is
powerless in her case, I hope to restore her to reason, though the
method which I am trying is, unluckily, only possible to the wealthy."

Then, like all who live much alone and daily bear the burden of a
heavy trouble, he fell to talk with the magistrate. This is the story
that he told, set in order, and with the many digressions made by both
teller and hearer omitted.



When, at nine o'clock at night, on the 28th of November 1812, Marshal
Victor abandoned the heights of Studzianka, which he had held through
the day, he left a thousand men behind with instructions to protect,
till the last possible moment, the two pontoon bridges over the
Beresina that still held good. This rear guard was to save if possible
an appalling number of stragglers, so numbed with the cold, that they
obstinately refused to leave the baggage-wagons. The heroism of the
generous band was doomed to fail; for, unluckily, the men who poured
down to the eastern bank of the Beresina found carriages, caissons,
and all kinds of property which the Army had been forced to abandon
during its passage on the 27th and 28th days of November. The poor,
half-frozen wretches, sunk almost to the level of brutes, finding such
unhoped-for riches, bivouacked in the deserted space, laid hands on
the military stores, improvised huts out of the material, lighted
fires with anything that would burn, cut up the carcasses of the
horses for food, tore out the linings of the carriages, wrapped
themselves in them, and lay down to sleep instead of crossing the
Beresina in peace under cover of night--the Beresina that even then
had proved, by incredible fatality, so disastrous to the Army. Such