BY THE WALL OF THE SOLDIERS' HOME. The Emperor Napoleon had long been dead. A wasting disease and English indignities had worn his life away upon his prison-rock of St. Helena; and, after many years, his body had been brought back to France, and placed beneath a mighty monument in the splendid Home for Invalid Soldiers, in the beautiful city of Paris which he had loved so much, and where his days of greatness and power had been spent. There, beneath the dome, surrounded by all the life and brilliancy of the great city, he rests. His last wish has been gratified--the wish he expressed in the will he wrote on his prison-rock, so many miles away: "I desire that my ashes shall rest by the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people I have loved so well." That Home for Invalid Soldiers, in which now stands the tomb of Napoleon, has long been, as its name implies, a home for the maimed and aged veterans who have fought in the armies of France, and received as their portion, wounds, illness,--and glory. The sun shines brightly upon the walls of the great home; and the war-worn veterans dearly love to bask in its life-giving rays, or to rest in the shade of its towering walls. It was on a certain morning, many years ago, that I who write these lines--Eugenie Foa, friend to all the boys and girls who love to read of glorious and heroic deeds--was resting upon one of the seats near to the shade-giving walls of the Soldiers' Home. As I sat there, several of the old soldiers placed themselves on the adjoining seat. There were a half-dozen of them--all veterans, grizzled and gray, and ranging from the young veteran of fifty to the patriarch of ninety years. As is always the case with these scarred old fellows, their talk speedily turned upon the feats at arms at which they had assisted. And this dialogue was so enlivening, so picturesque, so full of the hero-spirit that lingers ever about the walls of that noble building which is a hero's resting-place, that I gladly listened to their talk, and try now to repeat it to you. "But those Egyptians whom Father Nonesuch, here, helped to conquer," one old fellow said,--"ah, they were great story-tellers! I have read of some of them in a mightily fine book. It was called the 'Tales of the Thousand and One Nights.'" "Bah!" cried the eldest of the group. "Bah! I say. Your 'Thousand and One Nights,' your fairy stories, all the wonders of nature,"--here he waved his trembling old hand excitedly,--"all these are but as nothing compared with what I have seen." "Hear him!" exclaimed the young fellow of fifty; "hear old Father Nonesuch, will you, comrades? He thinks, because he has seen the republic, the consulate, the empire, the hundred days, the kingdom"-- "And is not that enough, youngster?" interrupted the old veteran they called Father Nonesuch.[1]