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Show 88 WESTEMN WILDS. amid smoke and carnage, and saw my companions fall on all sides I marched where shells plowed the earth and swords gleamed in the air, but passed them all and lived. But the storm which brought death to others, brought a strange quiet to me. I saw so much death that it reconciled me to life ; I saw such suffering among the poor people we had come to fight, that pity took the place of hate, and I grew ashamed of my thoughts of vengeance. The regi-ment to which I belonged was the first to be discharged. Then a longing grew upon me to revisit my native land, and early in 1848 I took passage for Havre. But I reached Geneva only to find all Europe rocking with revolution. Storms and tumult were to be my element ; I might change my sky, I could not change my destiny. " It was the year of revolution. France ejected Louis Philippe; Berlin followed in a few days with the students' insurrection, and the capture of the palace; the Viennese were soon in arms; Hun-gary struggled bravely against perfidious Austria ; even the long enslaved Italians rose against Carlo Alberto, and little Baden dared the anger of Prussia. In vain the tears and prayers of my mother, in vain the caresses of my sisters and nieces, or the calm arguments of my father; they had found me only to lose me at once. I hur-ried to join the Badenischen insurgents, then hastily organizing against the Prussian regulars. For awhile all went well. It seemed that man was at last to be free. But our triumphing was short. France took another Napoleon ; the troops fired on the Berlin patriots ; Wiindischgratz bombarded Vienna ; Gorgey surrendered without a battle, and the little band under Kossuth, driven to the inhospitable plains of inner Hungary, succumbed to the mongrel hordes of Cossack, Sclav, and Carpathian, poured upon them by the Russian Czar. The Badenischen army, too, retreated, and the revo-lutionists mostly sought the New World. The best blood of the fatherland was expelled, and Germany's loss became America's gain. " With many others I was captured; but, unlike them, I was a citizen of no country, and could claim no protection or ask no clemency. Four long years I languished in a German prison. Need I recall the lonesome hours? The days of unavailing struggle with myself; the nights of restless tossing, or sleep haunted by dreams of the dead. Daily I watched the gleam of yellow light breaking in through the little grating above my head, slowly moving around the walls of my dungeon, and dying away at last on the opposite side. The daily passage of that ray was my only relic of a bright past, my all of life, of light, of liberty. Nightly I sought relief by |