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"I am no coward," retorted the Catalan, with more spirit than his captors supposed him ble of displaying. "I have fought with the bear and the wolf when gaunt with famine, and felt no fear, though the idea of serving against my countrymen, and leaving my wife and children, makes a woman of me;" and again the truant tears bedimmed his manly cheeks.

The serjeant had a wife and family in France, whom he loved, and he was touched with the grief of the captive.-" Perhaps the Captain will allow you to take your chance of the lot, and will not force you to be a conscript against your will. At Barcelona, whither we are going, you may try your luck, that is, if Monsieur le Capitaine consents."

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Yes, yes, the poor fellow shall have a fair trial, and if he is drawn, he can write to his wife to join him."

A ray of hope gladdened the dejected Catalan, but it lasted only for a moment, and then faded away into deeper darkness than before. Like a

victim, he accompanied the detachment to Barcelona; and entering the town-hall, felt certain of his doom before the fatal lot was drawn. His forebodings were verified, and the only thing that softened the blow was, the assurance that he would not be compelled to serve against his country.

Pedro's unnerved and trembling hand could hardly perform the necessary task of writing to his wife. Among those young men, who had escaped a military life in the Emperor's service, he found a relation of his own, and Diego Garvos, promised to convey his last farewell to Blanca and his children.

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My Blanca," the blotted and irregular lines began, "will never see her poor spouse again; he has been drawn for a conscript, and will in a few days leave Spain for ever. Never, never, shall I see thee, or pretty Teresa, and playful Carlos again. The sheep must find another shepherd, the dogs another master,-Oh! that I had fought for my country, and died for her and thee, my

beloved; God has punished my indifference to the sufferings of my native land, by permitting me to fall into the hands of the French. Yes, they have made me a soldier,—a slave. I am to be led into France, and from thence to Russia; never, never to return to Catalonia. May the saints take thee into their holy keeping-thee, and our children.-Farewell, my Blanca, farewell for ever

!

Thy miserable husband,

PEDRO ALVEZ.

P. S. My kinsman, Diego Garvos, has promised to convey this safely to thee:-Alas! what is to become of thee I know not. My stipend is still due, for the robbers have not got that, so thou wilt not be utterly destitute.

Could I but look on thy dear face, and the sweet faces of my children, once more, I should be willing to lie down and die the next moment; but it may not be.

And lo! a woman, young and delicate,

Wrapt in a russet cloak from head to foot,
Her eyes cast down, her cheek upon her hand,
In deepest thought-

-ROGERS.

The new conscript remained at Barcelona some days, scarcely eating or sleeping, wasted alike by grief and sickness. His altered appearance made the serjeant think that the recruit would hardly leave the frontier alive. The surgeon, however, pronounced his malady to be of the mind, not of the body; and said that new scenes, and the stirring incidents of a military life, would restore the poor home-sick shepherd, when once he

should have quitted his native land. In that fine athletic form, those vigorous muscles, those nerves braced so tightly by the mountain air, he saw power to strive against suffering, to resist sickness; and strength, if not cut off by the accidents of life, to endure to old age. Jean Dubois, the serjeant, possessed a feeling heart; he, too, was a husband and father, and though the open manifestations of those tender affections these beloved objects inspired, appeared to him unmanly, he more than once entreated Captain Beauville to let the poor fellow go, with an earnestness and familiarity, unknown in any company in any other army. Beauville was his first cousin, and had risen from the ranks. Dubois expected to be an officer himself soon, and had a marshal's baton in perspective; thus neither birth nor education separated the commissioned from the non-commissioned officers, as in England. The history of the world shows us, that it is not good for uneducated men to attain to a height of power-power which is only obtained by brutal