Assured by the many precautions adopted, and by the cheerful language
of the officer on guard, who attended her to the carriage door,
Paulina, with one attendant, took her seat in the coach, where she had
the means of fencing herself sufficiently from the cold by the weighty
robes of minever and ermine which her ample wardrobe afforded; and the
large dimensions of the coach enabled her to turn it to the use of a
sofa or couch.

Youth and health sleep well; and with all the means and appliances of
the Lady Paulina, wearied besides as she had been with the fatigue of a
day's march, performed over roads almost impassable from roughness,
there was little reason to think that she would miss the benefit of her
natural advantages. Yet sleep failed to come, or came only by fugitive
snatches, which presented her with tumultuous dreams,--sometimes of the
emperor's court in Vienna, sometimes of the vast succession of troubled
scenes and fierce faces that had passed before her since she had
quitted that city. At one moment she beheld the travelling equipages
and far-stretching array of her own party, with their military escort
filing off by torchlight under the gateway of ancient cities; at
another, the ruined villages, with their dismantled cottages,--doors
and windows torn off, walls scorched with fire, and a few gaunt dogs,
with a wolf-like ferocity in their bloodshot eyes, prowling about the
ruins,--objects that had really so often afflicted her heart. Waking
from those distressing spectacles, she would fall into a fitful doze,
which presented her with remembrances still more alarming: bands of
fierce deserters, that eyed her travelling party with a savage rapacity
which did not confess any powerful sense of inferiority; and in the
very fields which they had once cultivated, now silent and tranquil
from utter desolation, the mouldering bodies of the unoffending