.... such as these old stone walls never witnessed,—the trial of Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here at Fouquier-Tinville's judgment-bar, answering for her life. The indictment was delivered her last night. To such changes of human fortune what words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate. . . .. Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm; "she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the piano." You discern, not without interest, across that dim revolutionary bulletin itself, how she bears herself queen-like. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. "You persist then in denial?"-"My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that.".... At four o'clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out,-sentence of death! "Have you anything to say?" The accused shook her head, without speech. Night's candles are burning out; and with her too time is finishing, and it will be eternity and day. This hall of Tinville's is dark, ill-lighted except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it, to die. Two processions, or royal progresses, three-and-twenty years apart, have often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast. The first is of a beautiful archduchess and dauphiness, quitting her mother's city, at the age of fifteen, towards hopes such as no other daughter of Eve then had : "On the morrow," says Weber, an eye-witness, "the dauphiness left Vienna. The whole city crowded out; at first with a sorrow which was silent. She appeared: you saw her sunk back into her carriage; her face bathed in tears; hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands; several times putting out her head to see yet again this palace of her fathers, whither she was to return no more. She motioned her regret, her gratitude to the good nation, which was crowding here to bid her farewell. Then arose not only tears, but piercing cries, on all sides. Men and women alike abandoned themselves to such expression of their sorrow. It was an audible sound of wail, in the streets and avenues of Vienna. The last courier that followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted away.” The young imperial maiden of fifteen has now become a worn, discrowned widow of thirty-eight; grey before her time this is the last procession: "Few minutes after the trial ended, the drums were beating to arms in all sections; at sunrise the armed force was on foot, cannons getting placed at the extremities of the bridges, in the squares, crossways, all along from the Palais de Justice to the Place de la Révolution. By ten o'clock, numerous patrols were circulating in the streets; thirty thousand foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven, Marie-Antoinette was brought out. She had on an undress of piqué blanc; she was led to the place of execution in the same manner as an ordinary criminal; bound, on a cart; accompanied by a constitutional priest in lay dress; escorted by numerous detachments of infantry and cavalry. These, and the double row of troops all along her road, she appeared to regard with indifference. On her countenance there was visible neither abashment nor pride. To the cries of Vive la République and Down with Tyranny, which attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She spoke little to her confessor. The tricolor streamers on the house-tops occupied her attention, in the Streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré; she also noticed the inscriptions on the house-fronts. On reaching the Place de la Révolution her looks turned towards the Jardin National, whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave signs of lively emotion. She mounted the scaffold with courage enough; at a quarter past twelve, her head fell; the executioner showed it to the people, amid universal long-continued cries of Vive la République.” THE SAME SUBJECT. Is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow, wasting ignominy; of thy birth, soft cradled in imperial Schönbrunn, the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment-bar were but the merciful end! Look there, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping; the face is stony pale, as of one living in death. Mean weeds, which her own hand has mended, attire the queen of the world. The deathhurdle where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop; a people, drunk with vengeance, will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell. The living-dead must shudder with yet one other pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her hands. There is there no heart to say, God pity thee! O think not of these; think of Him whom thou worshippest, the Crucified-who also treading the wine-press alone, fronted sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it and made it holy, and built of it a "sanctuary of sorrow," for thee and all the wretched. Thy path of thorns is nigh ended; one long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was once so light-where thy children shall not dwell. The head is on the block; the axe rushes-dumb lies the world; that wild-yelling world, with all its madness, is behind thee. VI. THE CAVE OF DAHRA. Douglas Jerrold, dramatist, satirist, and humorist, was born in London in 1808, and died in 1857. He contributed to Punch several of the best series of papers which have appeared in that witty periodical. During the war in Algeria the French found it impossible to subdue some of the Arab tribes by open fighting, as they retired to immense caverns (their usual residence), into which the regular soldiers could not follow them. Burning fagots were accordingly flung into the caves, and the heat rendered intense. The Arabs were suffocated by hundreds, and the conquest of the mountain tribes was thus completed. Marshal Pelissier, now Duke of Malakoff, was the officer by whom this barbarous deed was committed. The year was 1845. THERE is a cave in the world with a dread legend; travellers, in future times, will toil up the hot ridges of the Atlas Mountains to see the Cavern of Dahra, where a whole tribe of Arabs were foully murdered-and how? Were they half-naked savages in deadly feud with another tribe as barbarous as themselves? Were the murderers some nameless African clan, obscure in the world's history as those they put to death? Was the whole catastrophe one of those which inevitably must occur when savage wars against savage ? No; it occurred in a struggle between civilized man and semi-savage man; and, foul disgrace! the civilized were the murderers the savage the victims. It occurred in a war between the invaders of a country, and the inhabitants, who fought for their old possessions-their property, and their rights; and, foul blot! the assailants piled up the fagots, and the defenders perished! It occurred in a war waged by the French nation, which arrogates to itself the position of leader of European civilization-which claims the title of the most civilized, the most enlightened, the most polished people of the earth. The Arabs pretend to no such distinction; they form roving clans of uncivilized men, living a primitive pastoral life in caverns and tents; yet it was the enlightened, the polished, the humane aggressors, who roasted some eight hundred of the savages, for the crime of defending their own country, of daring, in legitimate warfare, to resist the legions which would have wrested it from them. The murder was no deed of a few minutes, no sudden outbreak of wrath, no massacre prompted by fiery longings for revenge. The cavern, into which the Arabs retreated, was a vast one; it had many chinks and crannies, and it was long ere the stifling smoke and baking fire did their work. The Frenchmen heard the moans and shrieks, and the tumult of despair, as dying men and women turned furiously on each other, and sought to free themselves from lingering agony by more sudden death: they heard the strokes of the yatagan and the pistol-shots, which told that suicide, or mutual destruction, was going on in the darkness of the cavern: they heard all this renewed at intervals, and continued hour after hour; but still they coolly heaped straw upon the blaze, tranquilly fed the fire, until all was silent but its own roaring; and burnt, maimed, and convulsed corpses, blackened, some of them calcined, by the fire, remained piled in mouldering, rotting masses in the cave, to tell that a few hours before a tribe of men, women, and children had entered its dreary portals. And now, great nation, what think ye Europe says of you? You plume yourselves on being the most mighty, the most advanced people of the earth, the very focus of light, intelligence, and humanity. The false glare of military glory which continually bedazzles you, shows massacre and rapine decked in the colours of good deeds. The itch of conquest seems to make you confound good and evil. If fight you will-fight like civilized soldiers, not like lurking savages. Mow down your enemies-if you must have war-in the fair field. Face them foot to foot, and hand to hand; but, for the sake of your fame-for the sake of the civilization you have attained, stifle not defenceless wretches in caverns -massacre not women and children by the horrible agency of slow fire. VII.-BATTLE OF BALACLAVA-CAVALRY CHARGE. (W. H. RUSSELL, LL.D.) William Howard Russell, LL.D., The Times Correspondent, was born in Dublin in 1816, and was educated at Trinity College. The battle of Balaclava, one of the most spirited and exciting contests of the Crimean war, was fought on 25th October 1854. THE cavalry who have been pursuing the Turks on the right are coming up to the ridge beneath us, which conceals our cavalry from view. The heavy brigade in advance is drawn up in two lines. The first line consists of the Scots Greys, and of their old companions in glory, the Enniskillens; the second of the 4th Royal Irish, of the 5th Dragoon Guards, and of the 1st Royal Dragoons. The Light Cavalry Brigade is on their left, in two lines also. The silence is oppressive; between the cannon bursts one can hear the champing of bits and the clink of sabres in the valley below. The Russians on their left drew breath for a moment, and then in one grand line dashed at the Highlanders. The ground flies beneath their horses' feet; gathering speed at every stride, they dash on towards that thin red streak topped with a line of steel. The Turks fire a volley at eight hundred yards, and |