“‘Come, my friends,’ said the non-commissioned adjutant Thomas, ‘one step forward: let us die upon the bodies of our officers.’ “These were the last distinct words that were heard; the death-rattle followed them, then the silence of the grave. In its turn, the second company had disappeared. All that now remained was the company under Captain de Géreaux, left in charge of the camp.” Mr Dumas’ habit of writing melodrama renders him very effective in this sort of romantic military chronicle, which is pretty well received in France, where people are used to the style. It is compounded upon the plan of all his historical romances and romantic histories, with the sole difference that, in these, he frequently audaciously perverts historic truth; whilst the African business is so recent that he cannot venture to be unfaithful to the outline, and confines himself to filling up and extending with his own fantastic details. Having been on the spot, and one of the first to welcome the few survivors of the prisoners taken in the above bloody affair, when they were ransomed from the Arabs, he doubtless picked up a number of the tales that always circulate in such cases; and these he has very cleverly amalgamated and patched up into a consecutive narrative—perhaps the most amusing section of those two volumes of _Le Véloce_ which alone as yet have reached us. His account of the fate of the last company—the one that stopped with the baggage—is the best bit of all, although certainly very French, and strongly impregnated with that peculiar flavour of theatrical fanfaronade which is inseparable from the character of our vain and volatile neighbours, which they cannot see, and consequently are not likely to lose, and which stirs the gall of prejudiced and untravelled Englishmen, and brings a smile to the lip of those who, with greater justice and in a better spirit, will not allow peculiarities of tone and manner to blind them to the good qualities of a gallant and ingenious nation, whose soldiers, although of late years they have more than once been employed in wars and expeditions unworthy of their prowess, have never lost an opportunity of proving that, in valour at least, they are no way degenerate from their fathers who fought under the banners of Napoleon the Great. And although one cannot but be amused at the ambitious comparison with Thermopylæ, the affair of Sidi-Ibrahim was unquestionably most honourable to the handful of brave fellows who defended the Marabout of that name against fifty times their number. The term _Marabout_ is applied, in Africa, not only to a saint, but to the small, round-roofed, stone edifice which serves as his mausoleum after death, and, not unfrequently, as his habitation during life. In a building of this description, after driving out the Arabs that occupied it, and when the cessation of the musketry warned them that their comrades were slain or prisoners, the last company of Colonel