operations, and in an hour the whole camp was in commotion. He gave orders for the immediate abandonment of the siege of Mantua, and for the whole army to arrange itself in marching order. It was an enormous sacrifice. He had been prosecuting the works of the siege with great vigor for two months. He had collected there, at vast labor and expense, a magnificent battering train and immense stores of ammunition. The city was on the very point of surrender. By abandoning his works all would be lost, the city would be revictualed, and it would be necessary to commence the whole arduous enterprise of the siege anew. The promptness with which Napoleon decided to make the sacrifice, and the unflinching relentlessness with which the decision was executed, indicated the energetic action of a genius of no ordinary mould. The sun had now gone down, and gloomy night brooded over the agitated camp. But not an eye was closed. Under cover of the darkness every one was on the alert. The platforms and gun carriages were thrown upon the campfires. Tons of powder were cast into the lake. The cannon were spiked and the shot and shells buried in the trenches. Before midnight the whole army was in motion. Rapidly they directed their steps to the western shore of Lake Garda, to fall like an avalanche upon the division of Quasdanovich, who dreamed not of their danger. When the morning sun arose over the marshes of Mantua, the whole embattled host, whose warlike array had reflected back the beams of the setting sun, had disappeared. The besieged, who were half famished, and who were upon the eve of surrender, as they gazed, from the steeples of the city, upon the scene of solitude, desolation, and abandonment, could hardly credit their eyes. At ten o'clock in the morning, Quasdanovich was marching quietly along, not dreaming that any foe was within thirty miles of him, when suddenly the whole French army burst like a whirlwind upon his astonished troops. Had the Austrians stood their ground they must have been entirely destroyed. But after a short and most sanguinary conflict they broke in wild confusion, and fled. Large numbers were slain, and many prisoners were left in the hands of the French. The discomfited Austrians retreated to find refuge among the fastnesses of the Tyrol, from whence they had emerged. Napoleon had not one moment to lose in pursuit. The two divisions which were marching down the eastern side of the lake, heard across the water the deep booming of the guns, like the roar of continuous thunder, but they were entirely unable to render any assistance to their friends. They could not even imagine from whence the foe had come, whom Quasdanovich had encountered. That Napoleon would abandon all his accumulated stores and costly works at Mantua, was to them inconceivable. They hastened along with the utmost speed to reunite their forces, still forty thousand strong, at the foot of the lake.