ineffective, and fearing premature exhaustion, endeavoured to sustain and collect his powers by remaining on the defensive; but it was now too late. His sword was irrecoverably entangled in the whirlwind involutions of Colonna's weapon--his hold began to relax--and he saw the moment rapidly approaching when he should be disarmed, and at the mercy of an unappeasable foe.[A] Despairing of success, thirsting for revenge, and regardless of the laws of fair and open combat, he suddenly drew his long dagger, dropped on one knee, and made a thrust which would have proved fatal to a less vigilant adversary. But Colonna had anticipated the possibility of this base attempt from one so destitute of all chivalrous feeling, and his quick eye observed and met the movement. Stepping lightly back, he whirled his keen-edged blade with a force which cut deep into Barozzo's wrist. The dagger dropped from his palsied grasp, and, at the same instant, his sword flew above his head. Colonna, having disarmed his treacherous enemy while still kneeling, disdained to follow up his advantage, and coolly said to him, "That trick was worthy of you, governor! but your murderous game is nearly up. Resume your sword, and clutch the guard more firmly, or in three passes more you will be food for vultures!" [Footnote A: When a student in Germany, the writer had twelve months' drill in fencing from a French emigrant, and saw a fencing-match _a l'outrance_ between that equivocal personage the Chevalier d'Eon--then an elderly man or woman--with a young and vigorous fencing-master, an emigrant nobleman, who, like Colonna, by rapid involutions, so entangled the foil of the Chevalier, that he was at length quite exhausted, and unable to ward off the incessant attacks of his adversary. He recollects, too, a curious fact, that the Chevalier, when fencing, emitted, whenever he lunged out, a succession of sounds from the throat, which he can only compare with the short grunts of a frightened pig.--_April 1858._]