"A moment of stupor succeeded to this carnage. The colonel, putting his hat on the point of his sword, clambered up the parapet the first, crying _Vive l'Empereur!_ and he was soon followed by the survivors. I have no distinct recollection of what occurred. We entered the redoubt, I don't know how. We fought, man to man, amid a smoke so thick that we could scarcely see each other. I must have struck like the rest, for I found my sabre all bloody. At last I heard the cry of 'Victory!' and, the smoke diminishing, I saw that blood and dead bodies almost covered the ground of the redoubt. The cannons were almost buried under the heaps of corpses. About two hundred men standing, in French uniforms, were grouped without order, some charging their pieces, others wiping their bayonets. Eleven Russian prisoners stood by them. "The colonel lay stretched, all bloody, upon a broken wagon, near the defile. Some soldiers pressed round him. I approached. 'Who is the senior captain?' he asked of a sergeant. The sergeant shrugged his shoulders in a most expressive manner. 'And the senior lieutenant?' 'This officer who arrived to-day!' said the sergeant, calmly. The colonel smiled sadly. 'Come, sir,' said he to me, 'you command in chief. You must at once fortify the redoubt, and barricade the defile with wagons, for the enemy is in force; but General C---- will support you.' 'Colonel,' said I to him, 'you are seriously wounded.' 'F----, my dear fellow, but the redoubt is taken.'" MEMORY AND ITS CAPRICES. There is no faculty so inexplicable as memory. It is not merely that its powers vary so much in different individuals, but that every one has found their own liable to the most unaccountable changes and chances. Why vivid impressions should appear to become utterly obliterated, and then suddenly spring to light, as if by the wand of a magician, without the slightest effort of our own, is a mystery which no metaphysician has ever been able to explain. We all have experience of this, when we have striven _in vain_ to recollect a name, a quotation, or a tune, and find it present itself unbidden, it may be, at a considerable interval of time, when the thoughts are engaged on another subject. We all know the uneasy feeling with which we search for the missing article, and the relief when it suddenly flashes across the mind, and when, as if traced by invisible ink, it comes out unexpectedly, bright and clear.