The reader will permit me to fix his attention upon the epoch of the battle of Iganie, which was indeed the brightest moment of our war, the moment of the highest success of the Polish arms, the moment of the most confident hopes, when every Pole in imagination saw his country already restored to her ancient glory. Let us then, from this point, cast a look backwards to the commencement of this terrible contest. Two months before, an enormous Russian force had invaded our country, defended as it was by a mere handful of her sons; and any one who had seen that immense army enter upon our soil, could not but have looked on Poland with commiseration, as about to be instantaneously annihilated. In this expectation, in fact, all Europe looked on, and at every moment the world expected to hear of the terrible catastrophe,--to see Poland again in chains, and the Russian arms reposing on the borders of the Rhine. Such, in fact, were the expectations and even the promises of marshal Diebitsch. Providence, however, willed otherwise. The first shock of the Polish arms with the Russians taught the latter what was the moral strength of patriotism,--what a nation can do for love of country and of liberty. The fields of Siedlce, Dobre, and Stoczek, the first witnesses of our triumphs, and the grave of so many of our enemies, taught them to respect the nation which they expected to subdue, made them repent the audacity of having passed our frontiers, and gave them a terrible presage of how dearly they would have to pay for this unjust invasion of our soil. Battle upon battle was given, in which the enemy were uniformly subjected to the severest losses. The two great roads leading from different directions to Warsaw, on which they had followed the Poles, were covered with their dead. Thus subjected to loss at every step, the enemy reached at last the field of Praga, and there collecting all his forces in one body, under a tremendous fire of artillery he thought to overpower our small forces. But he failed to do it. The immortal day of the 25th of February was nearly the destruction of his enormous force, and, after fifteen days of severe fighting, that great army, which was designed to destroy Poland and to make Europe tremble, was brought to a state of extremity. The autocrat and his general blushed at the menaces which they had uttered. Poland believed that the former would reflect upon those bloody struggles and the immense losses which he had suffered, and would be unwilling to continue such sacrifices. Nearly 50,000 Russians were already sacrificed. How many more lives might he not still lose? The Poles, although conquerors, held out the hand of reconciliation, as the letters that Skrzynecki addressed to Diebitsch have proved. In those letters, written with the utmost cordiality, frankness, and directness, he invited the Russian commander to present the real state of things to the monarch, and to assure him that the Poles longed to put an end to