The influence of these words upon those impassioned men, proud of their renown and proud of their leader, was almost inconceivable. The terrible rebuke fell upon them like a thunderbolt. Tears trickled down the cheeks of these battered veterans. Many of them actually groaned aloud in their anguish. The laws of discipline could not restrain the grief which burst from their ranks. They broke their array, crowded around the general, exclaiming, "we have been misrepresented; the enemy were three to our one; try us once more; place us in the post of danger, and see if we do not belong to the army of Italy!" Napoleon relented, and spoke kindly to them, promising to afford them an early opportunity to retrieve their reputation. In the next battle he placed them in the van. Contending against fearful odds they accomplished all that mortal valor could accomplish, rolling back upon the Austrians the tide of victory. Such was the discipline of Napoleon. He needed no blood-stained lash to scar the naked backs of his men. He ruled over mind. His empire was in the soul. "My soldiers," said he "are my children." The effect of this rebuke was incalculable. There was not an officer or a soldier in the army who was not moved by it. It came exactly at the right moment, when it was necessary that every man in the army should be inspired with absolute desperation of valor. Alvinzi sent a peasant across the country to carry dispatches to Wurmser in the beleaguered city. The information of approaching relief was written upon very thin paper, in a minute hand, and inclosed in a ball of wax, not much larger than a pea. The spy was intercepted. He was seen to swallow the ball. The stomach was compelled to surrender its trust, and Napoleon became acquainted with Alvinzi's plan of operation. He left ten thousand men around the walls of Mantua, to continue the blockade, and assembled the rest of his army, consisting only of fifteen thousand, in the vicinity of Verona. The whole valley of the Adige was now swarming with the Austrian battalions. At night the wide horizon seemed illuminated with the blaze of their camp fires. The Austrians, conscious of their vast superiority in numbers, were hastening to envelop the French. Already forty thousand men were circling around the little band of fifteen thousand who were rallied under the eagles of France. The Austrians, wary in consequence of their past defeats, moved with the utmost caution, taking possession of the most commanding positions. Napoleon, with sleepless vigilance, watched for some exposed point, but in vain. The soldiers understood the true posture of affairs, and began to feel disheartened, for their situation was apparently desperate. The peril of the army was so great, that even the sick and the wounded in the hospitals at Milan, Pavia, and Lodi, voluntarily left their beds and hastened, emaciate with suffering, and many of them with their wounds still bleeding, to resume their station in the ranks. The