The Marquis of Gordon slew three men in succession; Dundrennan was unhorsed in the melée, but shot a German trooper by his girdle-pistol, and mounted his horse, almost in the time I take to write it. Our old Marechal de Logis was hewing away on all sides with his enormous bilbo, keeping three or four horsemen in play at once, for we had now become broken, involved among the foe, and, while still spurring and pressing towards the Zaberne road, were engaged in a series of desperate personal combats, in which every gentleman of the Guard had at least two swords opposed to his single weapon. Poor Sir Quentin Home, though faint with loss of blood, had rid himself of two antagonists, when a third passed a sword fairly through his body. He uttered a wild cry, and, grasping the right hand of the Austrian to prevent him withdrawing the blade, he actually thrust the shell close up to the wound, and, rising in his stirrups with the last energies of despair and death, clove his destroyer through helmet and skull down to the moustache, and then threw his sword into the air, crying,-- 'A Home! a Home! _True to the end!_' and fell dead from his horse, with his foeman above him. It was the motto of his house he had cried aloud, and with it closed his life and his name, for--rest him, God!--Sir Quentin was the last of his race. Just as he sank from sight among the frightful débris of this brief and rapid conflict, I perceived before me a familiar face, flushed with excitement, and having a pair of eyes that glared at me through the ribs of a triple-barred helmet. This was Wolfgang Count Pappenheim, and we were somewhat apart from the general melée. Not a word did we exchange; but there was a furious blow given, a fortunate parry made, and then a deadly thrust or two; after which we paused, surveying each other with the gloomy determination of two men who were never to part alive. By one lucky stroke I cut his reins, which placed him completely at my mercy, for both his pistols were empty; so, with an oath of rage, he hurled them at my head. I then levelled a pistol full in his face, saying,-- 'Yield, Count--yield, or I kill you!' He smiled disdainfully, and, with a glance full of spite and fury, proffered his sword by the hilt. I stretched forth my hand to receive it, when suddenly the traitor turned the point upon me, and would have run me through the body had not the blade been struck up by Raynold Cheyne, who was at my side. He then passed his own sword twice through the body of Pappenheim, who fell forward on his horse's neck, and, with blood gushing from his mouth, dropped dead beneath our horse's feet. 'Here ends our rivalry!' thought I, as the Garde du Corps pressed on, and dashed furiously along the Zaberne road, leaving the Marquis de Toneins and his dragoons to pass through the deadly gap we had made in the ranks of the German reitres; but in achieving that service nearly twenty of my noble comrades left their bodies on the field.