news of "the most astounding exploit that ever established one man's mastery over the rest of his species shook the world"--Napoleon had left Elba and was again in France. As a house built of cards goes down before a breath, so the political edifice which Metternich and Castlereagh and their kind were laboriously building at Vienna fell to pieces at the news. The poor parrot who had been placed in the Tuilleries, caged by foreign bayonets, fled as the eagle winged its nearer flight to Notre Dame, and France prepared once more to shed her blood against the men who sought to force upon her a race of monarchs she despised. CHAPTER V CEPHALONIA The Hundred Days were over. Napoleon had played his last desperate stake for victory, and had lost. Charles Napier was not at Waterloo. He had quitted the Military College when the campaign opened, but he arrived too late for the great battle. He joined the army before Cambray, and went with it to Paris, but remained there only a few days. His journals and correspondence for this time are not forthcoming, and consequently we are without his own account of a most interesting period; but his brother's reminiscences of the occupation indicate plainly enough that once the fighting was over, regret for the fall of his idol would have made residence in Paris after Waterloo anything but pleasant to him. He went back to the Military College and bit again at his books. By and by he would make cartridges of them to fire into the rascals who are now robbing and trampling on England. Through the five years that follow the fall of Napoleon, he is at a white heat of rage and indignation with the Government. In 1816 he writes to his mother: "There are two millions of people in England and Ireland starving to enable Lord Camden to receive thirty-eight thousand a year, and to expend it on game and other amusements. It is hard, therefore, to say how long poor rascals who think their children's lives of as much consequence as partridges' eggs may choose to be quiet, or how soon, actuated by an '_ignorant impatience of taxation_,' they may proceed to borrow from Lord Camden." And in truth there was sufficient at this time to make his blood boil at what was going on in England. It was the apotheosis of the Tory squire. The game-laws were worthy of the feudal ages; taxation was terrible; the representation of the people in Parliament was a farce. When retrenchment was forced upon the Ministry they began by cutting down the miserable pensions for wounds and service of soldiers, but they kept intact their own gigantic sinecures. "If I have not a right to my pension," writes Napier to his mother in this year 1816, "I have no wish to keep it; the income must be slender that will not enable me to live in content. Nevertheless, this shows what our Ministers are, who begin by retrenching the incomes of those who have nothing else to live on, and who have fought and worked hard for years on almost nothing to gain