I was not easy in mind when I stood on the tower of St. Stephen's Church, in Vienna more than forty years ago, to find that what I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schönbrunn, not the Danube pouring grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little hamlets just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where Napoleon fought the battles of Aspern and Wagram. Nor was I quite easy when I set out to climb the St. Gotthard Pass, to find that although the valley below Airolo was so green with fertile pasture, and from the glaciers above me the heavens were pricked so boldly by the splintered peaks, I was thinking most where it was precisely that old Suwarrow dug the grave and threatened to bury himself, when his army refused to follow him; then how he must have looked when he had subdued them, riding forward in his sheepskin, or whatever rude Russian dress he wore, this uncouth hero who needed no scratching to be proved Tartar, while his loving host pressed after him into every death-yielding terror that man or nature could throw across his path. That I had good reason for my uneasiness, on second thoughts, I do not believe. Nor do I believe it is just for you, high-toned friend, to censure me as somewhat low and brutal, when I confess that of all one can see in Europe, nothing thrilled me quite so much as the great historic battle-fields. Nothing deserves so to interest man as man himself; and what spots, after all, are so closely and nobly connected with man as the spots where he has fought? That we are what we are, indeed that we are at all,--that any race is what it is or is at all,--was settled on certain great fields of decision to which we as well as every race can point back. And then nothing absorbs us like a spectacle of pain and pathos! Tragedy enchants, while it shocks. The field of battle is tragedy the most shocking; is it doing indignity to our puzzling nature to say it is tragedy most absorbing? And there is another side. Once at midnight, in the light of our bivouac-fire, our captain told us in low tones that next day we were to go into battle. He was a rude fellow, but the word or two he spoke to us was about duty. And I well remember what the men said, as we looked by the fire-light to see if the rifles were in order. They would go into fire because duty said, "Save the country!" and when, soon after, the steeply-sloping angle of the enemy's works came into view, ominously red in the morning light, and crowned with smoke and fire, while the air hummed about our ears as if swarming with angry bees, and this one and that one fell, there was scarcely one who, as he pulled his cap close down and pushed ahead in the skirmish-line, was not thinking of duty. They were boys from farm and factory, not greatly better, to say the most, than their fellows anywhere; and we may be sure that thought