The train stopped as he concluded, and a fine-looking veteran, with white hair, an empty sleeve, and a silken patch over one eye, peered inquisitively into the carriages. Like most Englishmen, I have a particular aversion to the Continental fashion of men kissing and hugging each other, but I confess I beheld with interest and sympathy the cordial embrace of these two old comrades, who then quickly separated, and, with hands grasped, looked joyously and affectionately into each other’s faces, whilst a thousand recollections of old kindness and long comradeship were evidently swelling at their hearts. In his joy, my travelling companion did not forget the attentive listener, whose journey he had so agreeably shortened. Turning to me, he presented me to the general, as an Englishman and a new acquaintance, and then cordially invited me to pass the rest of the day at his house. But the business that took me to Orleans was urgent, and my return to Paris must be speedy. And had it been otherwise, I think I still should have scrupled to restrain, by a stranger’s presence, the first flow of intimate communion to which the two friends evidently looked forward with such warm and pleasurable feelings. So I gratefully declined, but pledged myself to take advantage of the doctor’s hospitality upon my next visit to Orleans. When that occurs, I shall hope to glean another Russian Reminiscence. RECORDS OF THE PAST.—NINEVEH AND BABYLON. History must ever possess an undying fascination for the minds of men, for its subject is the story of their race, and its interest is ever human to the core. Its burden is now a song of rejoicing at the triumphs, or a wail of lamentation over the errors and sufferings, of mankind. How history, in gifted hands, exults as it reaches those blooming points in a nation’s career—those eras of Pericles, of Augustus, of Haroun-Alraschid, or of our own Elizabeth,—or, piercing back through the veil of time, discerns with joy the brilliant era of a Vicramaditya in the old world of the Hindoos,—the grandeur of a Rameses, or still remoter monarchs in Egypt—or a rule of then unequalled justice and beneficence extending back for countless ages in the early history of secluded China. And how it saddens to see these old empires pass away,—to behold Rome, and Greece, and Nineveh, and Egypt, Susa and Persepolis, and the grand old cities of India, withered, rolled up like a scroll, and vanishing from the face of the earth. Yet with what quiet hopefulness, with what assured resignation, does it contemplate all those changes. “Passing away,” it knows, is written from the first upon the brow of empires as well as of men; and even when the mighty fabrics of human power are seen crumbling into dust beneath internal decay or external assault,—when the stores of knowledge, the monuments of art—in fact, a whole civilisation—seems rushing into oblivion before an onslaught of barbarism, the philosophic historian, with an assuredness