How happy, but how fleeting is that time of life, when one is unacquainted with ambition, which sacrifices every thing to the desire of fortune and the glory that follows in her train, and with love, the supreme power of which absorbs and concentres all our faculties upon one sole object! that age of innocent pleasures, and of confident credulity, when the heart, as yet a novice, follows the impulse of youthful sensibility, and bestows itself unreservedly upon the object of disinterested affection! Then, surely, friendship is not a vain name! The confidant of all the secrets of M. de P----, I myself undertook nothing without first intrusting him with my designs; his counsels regulated my conduct, mine determined his resolution; our youth had no pleasures which were not shared, no misfortunes which were not solaced, by our mutual attachment. With what chagrin did I not perceive that fatal moment arrive, when my friend, obliged by the commands of a father to depart from Warsaw, prepared to take leave of me! We promised to preserve for ever that lively affection which had constituted the chief happiness of our youth, and I rashly swore that the passions of a more advanced age should never alter it. What an immense void did the absence of M. de P---- leave in my heart! At first it appeared that nothing could compensate for his loss; the tenderness of a father, the caresses of my sisters, affected me but feebly. I thought that no other method remained for me to dissipate the irksomeness of my situation, than to occupy my leisure moments with some useful pursuit. I therefore cultivated the French language, already esteemed throughout all Europe; I read with delight those famous works, the eternal monuments of genius, which it had produced; and I wondered that, not withstanding such an ungrateful idiom, so many celebrated poets, so many excellent philosophers and historians, justly immortalized, had been able to distinguish themselves by its means. I also applied myself seriously to the study of geometry; I formed my mind in a particular manner to the pursuit of that noble profession which makes a hero at the expence of one hundred thousand unfortunates, and which men less humane than valiant have called the grand art war! Several years were employed in these pursuits, which are equally difficult and laborious; in short, they solely occupied my thoughts. M. de P----, who often wrote to me, no longer received any but short replies, and our correspondence began to languish by neglect, when at length love finished the triumph over friendship. My father had been for a long time intimately connected with Count Pulaski. Celebrated for the austerity of his manners, famous on account of the inflexibility of his virtues, which were truly republican, Pulaski, at once a great captain and a brave soldier, had on more than one occasion signalized his fiery courage, and his ardent patriotism.