battle-field. But his generals flocked around him, and the old grenadiers shouted, 'Withdraw, sire! Death will not have you.' They did not know that it was because the Emperor had forfeited his right to die as a French soldier. They led him half-resisting from the field; and, unknown in his own army, he rode away into the darkness of the night, having lost everything. 'So ended the battle of Waterloo,' said the captain, as he seated himself on the bench and arranged his neckcloth."
I shall be in despair, and forfeit all my poor claims to being a judge of literature, if my readers do not read this splendid narrative with the same breathless interest as I did; and if that awful figure of "the little man on the white horse" does not haunt their imaginations, as it did mine, for many an hour after they have read it. I thought the description of Waterloo in Stendhal's "Chartreuse de Parme" was the last and greatest word that literature had to speak on that historic day; but really Kielland is finer, to my mind, than even Stendhal. At all events, I have never read anything which brought home to my imagination with the same vividness the terrible central figure of that day; and all the godlike genius and demoniac power, all the horror and glory and despair which were embodied in his person in the battle-field.
THE END.
F. M. EVANS AND CO., LIMITED, PRINTERS, CRYSTAL PALACE, S.E.
