The cause for exertion being over, his spirits fell with the rapidity of a spring too highly wound up, which snaps and runs down to immobility. He entered his tent and threw himself on the bed, from which he did not raise for the five following days. CHAPTER IX. THE LAST DAYS OF VILLANOW. At a time when the effects of these sufferings and fatigues had brought his bodily strength to its lowest ebb, the young Count Sobieski was roused by information that the Russians had planted themselves before Praga, and were preparing to bombard the town. The intelligence nerved his heart's sinews again, and rallied the spirits, also, of his depressed soldiers, who energetically obeyed their commander to put themselves in readiness to march at set of sun. Thaddeus saw that the decisive hour was pending. And as the moon rose, though hardly able to sit his noble charger, he refused the indulgence of a litter, determining that no illness, while he had any power to master its disabilities, should make him recede from his duty. The image of his mother, too, so near the threatened spot, rushed on his soul. In quick march he led on his troops. Devastation met them over the face of the country. Scared and houseless villagers were flying in every direction; old men stood amongst the ashes of their homes, wailing to the pitying heavens, since man had none. Children and woman sat by the waysides, weeping over the last sustenance the wretched infants drew from the breasts of their perishing mothers. Thaddeus shut his eyes on the scene. "Oh, my country! my country!" exclaimed he; "what are my personal griefs to thine? It is your afflictions that barb me to the heart! Look there," cried he to the soldiers, pointing to the miserable spectacles before him; "look there, and carry vengeance into the breasts of their destroyers. Let Praga be the last act of this tragedy." "Unhappy young man! unfortunate country! It was indeed the last act of a tragedy to which all Europe were spectators--a tragedy which the nations witnessed without one attempt to stop or to delay its dreadful catastrophe! Oh, how must virtue be lost when it is no longer a matter of policy even to assume it." [Footnote: To answer this, we must remember that Europe was then no longer what she was a century before. Almost all her nations had turned from the doctrines of "sound things," and more or less drank deeply of the cup of infidelity, drugged for them by the flattering sophistries of Voltaire. The draught was inebriation, and the wild consequences burst asunder the responsibilities of man to man. The selfish principle ruled, and balance of justice was then seen only aloft in the heavens!] After a long march through a dark and dismal night, the morning began to break; and Thaddeus found himself on the southern side of that little river which divides the territories of Sobieski from the woods of Kobylka. Here, for the first time, he endured all the torturing varieties of despair.