keenly alive to anything bearing on the service in which his life had been passed, and to all news from India. Sir Geoffry had very little sense of humour, and his favourite journals were remarkable for the copiousness of their information rather than for their wit; but probably nothing in the world had ever caused the general so much amusement, as to listen to Madge's reckless pronunciation of the Hindostanee words and Indian proper names with which her reading was studded. A hearty laugh during the whole course of his life had been almost unknown to him, and he was far too well-bred to let any woman, whatever might be her position, have an idea that she was exposing herself to ridicule; but he suffered a martyrdom in repressing his smiles, more especially when Madge, trying, in order to please him, to get up a fictitious interest in the budget through which she was wading, would ask the meaning of some of the words which she had so abominably mispronounced. One evening, Sir Geoffry, who had experienced rather an extra amount of enjoyment from Madge's mistakes, hearing her voice suddenly break and stop, looked up, and was surprised to find that she had fallen back in her chair while still tightly clutching the newspaper which she had been reading. The old general jumped to his feet and hurried across the room, intending to summon assistance; but before he could reach the bell, Mrs. Pickering had sufficiently recovered to sit up, and to beg him in a low tone to take no further notice of her indisposition, which had almost passed away. "Passed away!" echoed the general, taking Mrs. Pickering's hand kindly between his own; "an attack like that, under which you completely collapsed for a moment, does not pass away so quickly. I am afraid you have been over-exerting yourself, my dear Mrs. Pickering, and that I have been over-exacting in my demands on your strength." She said, "No," that it was nothing beyond a little faintness, which might have been caused by the heat of the room. She had not been well for the last few days; but she was perfectly ready to go on reading. This, however, Sir Geoffry would not hear of. He strongly recommended Mrs. Pickering to take a pint of champagne before going to bed; she was a little low, and wanted picking up, and for that, in his experience both in England and in India, there was nothing like champagne. She would not? Well, she knew best, but that was his prescription, at all events. She should certainly knock off reading for the night, and he would advise her to get to bed as soon as possible. He wished her good-night, and trusted she would not attempt to rise unless she felt herself perfectly recovered the next morning. 66 Very extraordinary woman that," said the old general, as he closed the door behind her; never seems to me to eat anything, and drinks as little as though she were a Scotch griff, determined to outlast all his colleagues. It is perfectly plain to me that she wants more nourishment. I must get Budd to prescribe stimulants for her; perhaps if they are ordered by him, she may be induced to take them. By the way, what was that very interesting paragraph she was reading when she was taken ill?" pursued Sir Geoffry, picking up the fallen newspaper, and looking at it through his double glass. "Something about exchanges, I think-no, no, this was it," and he read the following paragraph: "We understand that Mrs. Bendixen, widow of Andreas Bendixen, Esq., late senior partner in the well-known firm of Bendixen, Bishchoffsheim, and Kaulbach, of Calcutta and Shanghai, is about to be married to Philip Vane, Esq., formerly in the army, but well known of late in the City in connexion with several successful financiering operations. The marriage will take place at the beginning of next month. Our Indian readers will not need to be reminded of the vast wealth amassed by Mr. Bendixen, a large portion of which was bequeathed to his widow." 66 Bendixen," muttered the general to himself; "I recollect him in Calcutta: a man of my own age, I should think. I didn't know his wife; I suppose he married after he came home. Vane, Vane? Can't be the little man with red hair that was in the Twenty-sixth? No, his name was Tom, and he died of sunstroke. Philip Vane, known in the City? I wonder if old Sam Irving knows anything about him ?" Then the general sat down and tried to continue the perusal of the papers, but he soon found himself dropping to sleep; and after a good deal of nodding and starting, he yielded the point and went off to bed. About an hour afterwards, when perfect quiet reigned throughout the house, Madge Pierrepoint opened the door of her bedroom, stole quietly down the staircase into the library, and possessed herself of the newspaper, with which she returned in the same stealthy manner. Once in her own room again, she lighted a candle, threw a heavy cloak on the floor along the door, so that no chance rays might penetrate to the landing, and, wrapping her dressing-gown around her, sat down to read. So she was right in her supposition that her sudden illness had not deceived her, but had itself been caused by what she had read. There it was plainly visible before her burning eyes. Philip Vane, formerly of the army;" there could be no doubt about it. He must have either a high opinion of her powers of endurance, or an utter contempt for her, when he could sanction the insertion of such a paragraph! She could understand the announcement well enough when the ceremony had been performed, and the whole thing settled; but to have it bruited about beforehand, when there was a chance of interference, was very unlike Philip Vane's usual discretion. Ah, she had forgotten-she, the only one woman, except the bride, interested in the intended marriage, was also the only person acquainted with the fact a revelation of which would render the marriage impossible, and her antagonism was apparently despised. Let Philip Vane have a care; for if he were about to take this step reliant on her tolerance, or defiant of her opposition, most assuredly he had miscalculated the depths of her resentment. "Well known for his success in the City," the newspaper said; he was prosperous then in every way; she did not grudge him that kind of success, but was he to marry again, glorying in his crime and announcing the value of the conquest he had made in a vulgar, vaunting paragraph, while she was to lead a solitary, celibate life, supported by her own labour, and denying herself the rest, support, and devotion which in two instances at least had been proffered to her? He should not be suffered to carry on matters thus, with a high hand, without her making some attempt to check him, that she was determined. Accustomed as she had been for a long time to think she had schooled herself to disregard anything appertaining to Philip Vane, she was astonished to find how much and how strongly this intelligence had affected her. The old defiant spirit which at one time had been in the habit of obtaining occasional dominion over her, seemed once more aroused, and she felt that it would be impossible for her to submit herself quietly to the insult thus brought under her notice. Moreover, it was her duty to prevent this woman, whoever she might be, from being thus sacrificed. Not that there was much fear that Philip Vane would desert a wife who brought to him riches and position, but she at least ought to be warned of what manner of man it was that sought her hand, and of the impossibility of his legally fulfilling his contract. Yes, she would act, and act at once. The thought of the calm, contemptuous manner in which her existence had been ignored by Philip Vane rendered her far more incensed against him than she was at the time of his heartless desertion of her, and nerved her to the resolution of showing him that, though up to a certain point she had accepted the terms imposed upon her, by supporting herself quietly, and leading uncomplainingly a solitary life, there was yet a measure of outrage which she would not brook. What steps should she take? She must have advice on this point, and fortunately she was enabled to command it. Mr. Drage was acquainted with the fact of her former marriage, and to him she would appeal, telling him what news she had so strangely heard, and asking his advice as to what would be the best course for her to pursue. Thinking it over further, she admitted to herself that Mr. Drage's counsel was only required on a lesser point. That she would make some move in the matter, that she would assert herself, and not merely threaten, but carry out her vengeance if this marriage were proceeded with, she had determined. Anything that Mr. Drage might say in opposition to this decision, and she had some idea that he might be opposed to it, would be in vain; all she wanted of him was advice as to the best steps for her to take. Thus firmly resolved, Madge fell asleep and dreamed a pleasant dream, in which Philip Vane, who had gone into the church, was painting a large picture, the central figures in which were Gerald Hardinge and an Indian lady, quite black, whom he had recently married. The next morning Mr. Drage was in his study, looking through some notes for a sermon which he intended to write, when Mrs. Pickering was announced. It was not unusual for Madge to call at the rectory to spend an hour with little Bertha, when her duties took her into the town; but Mr. Drage never saw her unexpectedly, or even heard her name mentioned, without "Yes, you, and you alone of all people in the world, can give me the advice which I require." This exordium was anything but calculated to allay the rector's perturbation. "You recollect a conversation which we had some time since, Mr. Drage, a confession which I made to you?" Mr. Drage bowed in acquiescence. "Last night I received information by the merest accident, through the medium of a newspaper paragraph, that my husband "Was dead!" cried Mr. Drage, bending cagerly forward. "Was going to be married again!" said Madge Pierrepoint. OLD STORIES RE-TOLD. A COLONEL OF PANDOURS. accompanied his father through a whole campaign, which ended with the battle of Peterwardin, where his sire received two dangerous wounds from the Turkish sabres. Not long after, the young fire-eater was present at the battle of Milazzo, in Sicily, where his father was twice shot through the calf of the leg. Swords having been the young soldier's playthings, it was not unnatural that, in that same year, young Trenck fought his two brothers, who were jealous of his progress in Latin syntax, and wounding one, put the other to flight. The In the year 1725, soon after the appointment of the elder Trenck to the governorship of the castle of Brodt, a fortress on the river Save, the border line of Sclavonia, Trenck's brother was thrown from a coach and killed, and he himself was all but lost in the ice while duck-shooting. In 1727, the young Prussian launched into life, the Hungarian Palatine, Count Nicholas Palf, presenting him with a pair of colours in his own regiment, but, after a time, the young man retired to Pastorat, a Sclavonian estate, bought for him by his father, and lived there tolerably tranquilly as a country squire till the year 1734. In July of that year, Trenck set out with a retinue of twenty dashing Pandour tenants (the roads being infested with highwaymen), to go and buy hunters at a fair at Nassiza. Here, two of his tenants having their horses stolen, Trenck in a fury started two of his hard-spurring, rough-and-ready followers to overtake the thieves. Pandours seized the rascal, and, in an attempt at rescue, shot a ringleader of the robber village. The magistrate of Nassiza, instead of punishing the horse-stealer, angrily demanded the surrender of the Pandour who had killed the robber. Trenck refusing, the magistrate immediately ordered forty of his own Pandours to carry him off by force, a command which Trenck Francis Trenck (a cousin of the cele- promptly met, by enjoining his twenty brated prison breaker), born at Reggio, in troopers not to let the rogue out of their Calabria, in 1711, was the son of a Prussian hands alive. The forty Pandours were gentleman, whose ancestors had been for rough people, and they instantly fired at ages lords of the great and little Schar- ten paces, killing Trenck's harambascha, laken and Schahanlaken. His mother was or captain, dead on the spot, and grazing of the Kettern family, and descended from Trenck's car. Trenck and his nineteen the ducal house of Courland. Trenck men instantly darted off to Esseck and began early to display that fearlessness demanded satisfaction. But the staff and gasconading courage that ever after-auditor there being Trenck's bitter enemy, wards distinguished him, for at four years old he wounded himself with one of his father's pistols, and at five robbed some market women, whom he had at first frightened by flourishing a hanger. At seven he To accurately compare the Prussian officers of Frederick the Great's time with their more polished, but equally brave descendants, we must turn to those wild days of fighting when Turkish sabres were always flashing over the Bosnian frontier, and when the irregular bands which Austria sent against the turbaned infidels included men of such chivalrous and desperate hardihood as the colonel of Pandours, a hero of the Seven Years' War, whose life-size portrait we shall here attempt to place before our readers' eyes. at once put him into arrest, and condemned him to pay seventeen hundred florins for fine and law charges, his Pandour who killed the refractory countryman being condemned to seven years' hard labour at the fortifications. The vexation of this brought on the yellow jaundice, and Trenck would have died had not Count Kevenhuller, the commandant of Esseck, soon released him from his imprisonment. Disgusted with Sclavonia, the young officer then went to live with his father at Leitschau, where he was commandant, and in this place, Trenck's temper being rather ruffled with recent vexations, he cut off an Hungarian's arm in a sabre duel. Here, also, he fell desperately in love with the wife of a count, and was challenged by the indignant husband to fight with pistols. While they were making ready, the ramrod of one of Trenck's pistols broke, at which he at once flung away the weapon, and advanced to meet the furious count with one pistol only. The count stepped forward eleven quick paces, fired, and missed; Trenck then blazed off, and shot him through the breast, at which, in his memoirs, the baron rejoices, with not the slightest compunction in the world. Another scrape, which led to Trenck the incorrigible being put in arrest for six weeks, compelled his father to send him back again to his rough Sclavonian estate. But the wild young soldier was not long to rust in rustic solitude. In 1737, the Turkish war broke out like the rush of a rocket, and down, with clash of cymbals and roll of kettle-drums, came the Moslems on the Danubian frontier. Trenck's blood fired at this, and off he rode to Count Seckendorff, offering to raise four thousand Pandours, and to carry them into Bosnia at his own expense. Mortified at his offer being refused, Trenck instantly entered the Russian service, and engaged as second captain in Cuming's newly raised regiment of Russian hussars, which were sent through Poland to Kieff. Now Trenck met with the most perilous adventures of his life. In April, 1738, the Russian army, three hundred thousand strong, set out across the river Dnieper for Bender, a fortress on the Turkish frontier. Trenck, sent galloping off with despatches to the Don Cossacks and Calmucks, and, after that, as far as Astracan, did not rejoin the army till it had reached a wild desert country on the other side of the river Bug. The day after his return, a loud screeching and firing announced the attack of a fierce horde of one hundred thousand Crim Tartars, who came rushing on, howling like wild beasts. A hot cannonade followed, which ended in the slaughter of fourteen thousand Tartars. 'During the whole action," says Trenck, with more even than his usual modesty, "I was exposed to the very hottest of the enemy's fire, and behaved throughout with so much undauntedness, as to merit the special commendation of General Munich, who was an eye-witness of my conduct." A true Gascon was this rough hussar, a little wolfish in his rage, a little sharkish in his love of plunder, but fearless as a grizzly bear, and brave as his own sword. Not far from the river Dniester the Tartars were at it again. In the dusk of the evening Trenck's hussar regiment was surrounded by clouds of the enemy. His colonel, major, captain, and lieutenantcolonel rode off at once to the army half a league distant, and forgot to return, but Trenck stood firm as a wall, with fourteen men, till his scattered regiment could halt and form. But for this they would have been all mincemeat in a quarter of an hour. The Tartars halted a moment, then came on with an hurrah. Six of the fourteen hussars were instantly speared, the rest wounded. Trenck's bullets were soon all gone, and he had only his sabre to guard his head. The first rascal that came at him he slashed across the body, then grappled with him, but while he was trying to drag the rogue off his horse a second Tartar came, "and ran his spear through my backbone and spleen," as the gallant hussar expresses it. Leaving his sabre sticking in the first Tartar's carcass, Trenck felt it was time to save himself; so spurring his horse he rode off to the army with the Tartar spear still sticking in his back. The surgeon instantly pulled it out, and placed him in a litter, and the brave Quixote, strong as an ox, recovered after four weeks' bandaging. This unlucky campaign, in which the Russians lost twenty thousand horses and oxen, and buried fifty thousand brave men, ended in the Muscovites burying their bombs and cannon under a heap of corpses, and retreating to the frontier. Trenck had now been so long without a duel, that he grew quite hungry for a single combat. Having words, therefore, at Baron Lowenthal's table, he called out the offender, a Russian officer, who wounded him on the thumb joint. Getting cured in about fourteen days, Trenck again challenged the Russian with sword and pistols. And this time he meant mischief. Having fired both his pistols and missed, the Russian drew his sword to leap on Trenck, who, however, leave Russia for ever. “I was prodigiously shocked," says the unconquerable Trenck, "at so ignominious a forgiveness, and loudly exclaiming against it, I insisted on being put immediately to death." But no one heeding his entreaties, Trenck was carried being on his guard, fired steadily, and shot the rash Muscovite just on the top of the forehead, and but for the man's hood would have killed him on the spot. Fresh troubles soon broke like a storm on this lion of a man. A colonel of Orloff's dragoons, abusing and striking him for some military move-off in his anger, and sent to the fortress of ment which did not please him, Trenck boxed his ear and drew his sword on him. The colonel at once carried his complaints to General Romanzoff, who, hating all Germans, put Trenck under arrest, loaded with irons of twenty-eight pounds weight, which brought on a violent fever. After languishing for three weeks, Colonel Orten, a Prussian friend, came to tell him that he had been condemned to be shot, but that six of his friends had sworn together to rescue him from prison, and conduct him to Poland. Trenck answered resolutely that his honour would not permit him to run from so unjust a sentence; therefore, although equally obliged to the colonel and his other friends, he could not accept their kind offer. During his illness Trenck was robbed, as he says pathetically, of everything but his two litter horses, three shirts, a furred night-gown, and two hundred ducats, which he had secretly sewn in the waistband of his breeches. At length came the 10th of January, which the baron, as proud of his misfortunes as of his exploits, says justly, was one of the gloomiest days of his whole life." Before daybreak General Hickman's adjutant came into the room where Trenck lay in bed, racked by fever, and guarded by an officer and two sentinels, to drag him to the place of execution. Half dead, and very feeble, Trenck supplicated the adjutant to send the grenadiers to shoot him in bed, as he was too ill to move. On this one of the sentinels brutally dragged the sick man out of his bed, and hauled him barefooted, and in his night-gown, through ice and snow, to a ring surrounded by soldiers, where his sentence of death was publicly read to him as he knelt there, too weak to stand. A sergeant then came, and, according to Russian custom, pinned a white paper heart to the left breast of the doomed man. They were going to blindfold him, but this disgrace he stoutly resisted, declaring that no one should prevent him staring death boldly in the face. While he was still struggling, an ensign came running up, crying "A pardon." Trenck's life was spared, but only on the shameful conditions that he should work six months at the fortifications, and at the end of that time Pezier, near Kieff. There was there a On February 8th, 1740, Trenck set out for Germany, with two servants, seven horses, and an escort of nine soldiers, who had to conduct him to the frontier of Poland. After twice escaping from Polish banditti, Trenck arrived safe at his father's house at Leitschau. The old man shed tears of joy at the sight of the long-lost son,; Trenck, embracing him, told him his sufferings and adventures in many lands; then they both joined in offering thanks to God for so wonderfully preserving the soldier in the midst of many perils. But the old nature soon broke out; Trenck's wife was dead, and his father importuned him to marry again; but Trenck's experience of matrimony had not been favourable, so he resolved to go and visit again his estate in Sclavonia. To his rage he found the country overrun by robbers, who plundered, beat, and murdered the peasants. |