We all know the weak and vacillating policy of the Mountain during the earlier stages of the later Republic—if that may be said to have had any stage at all, which was born to die so soon. Violent—without strength; headstrong—without wisdom; it moved—under the leadership of Rollin—straight onward to an utter ruin. It had committed itself from the beginning, to all the impracticabilities of the modern French mind. The _ouvrier_ Albert was the type of its philosophy. Ignorant, stolid: it thought that the poor were the only class in society to be cared for; and that true government consisted in setting on foot, and in keeping up an endless and inextinguishable warfare between the beggars and the rich. The organization of labor, forsooth! Labor organizes itself; and is best protected when the magistrate lets it alone. Charles might have done better had he but followed his own counsels; and I believe he would have done so, had he not entered upon his public life swayed by private friendships and predilections. Certainly, he who reads the history of his hero aright, will find no such half-measures, no such ideas of one side alone, in his speculations. But the Mountain walked upon ashes; and the fatal day came in that sweet month of June, which God made for love, and its fruition; but which a son of the Republic—stern and honest, yet weak as the rest, blind to the future, and driven by a necessity, much of his own making—has marked with blood in his country’s calendar. I was thinking of Paqueta, and what her part might be in her husband’s ambitions, when the reverberations of the fusilade of Paris, the cries of the massacred of the 25th, smote upon my ears, here, three thousand miles from the scene of that tragedy. Thus fell the Mountain: and with the Mountain, and through the Mountain fell the Republic; for the Republic died with the coming in of the Dictatorship, and the Mountain rested and must ever rest upon the shoulders of the poor. As the smoke cleared away, amid the quietude of death, I looked around for my friend; and I found him listed among those who—on either side—had fought for a phantom, even unto the bitter end. Charles R——, laid down his life at the barricades, a shame to that leader who now eats of foreign bread. CHAPTER IV.