Sadi gained the ruins above with a great gash upon his cheek and his precious fiddle cleaved in half by a cut from a Prussian sword. Up in the open his eyes beheld a glad sight. A regiment of infantry stood at the halt not twenty paces from him. Its officers were moving about as though in quest of some mystery, and when they perceived him they advanced a little curiously and bade the fiddler halt. He answered them in words which were almost incoherent. "The ruins are full of Prussians," he said, and pointed downwards to the cellars he had left. No other word was spoken or needed. Savagely, silently, as beasts of prey that have found quarry, the soldiers fixed their bayonets and began to go down. And Sadi stood entranced, listening to the cries of men in their death agony, to their prayers for mercy; and he said, "This wrong at least is avenged." And so he turned from the scene, with his poor broken fiddle, and the long day of loneliness before him. "I shall not play in Munich; I shall never see little Lucy again," he said. But he knew that he had done his duty, and his step was firmer when he set out again for the terrible streets of a city about to open its gates to the enemy. _Prince Henry's Beast Book._ The many thousands who have laughed over the inimitable Artemus Ward's essays in natural history, such as "The elephant has four legs--one on each corner; he eats hay and cakes," might little suspect the analogy which exists between these humorous trifles and the serious works of the zoological pundits of the seventeenth century. If anything, far greater is the humour to be extracted from the older writers; especially when we recollect that their books and treatises on animal creation were regarded with infinite respect--veneration even--by young and old, wise and unwise, noble and plebeian, who diligently consulted them. Unhappily, most of these productions are in Latin, and even Artemus Ward in Latin would probably lose the fine savour of merriment by which his good things are distinguished unless the translator relied upon puns, as they do in the Westminster plays. But the pictures in Aldrovandus, in Albertus Magnus, in Johannes Jonstonus, and in Conrad Gesner speak--shall we not rather say, shriek?--for themselves; and we were recently fortunate in coming across a large volume in which the best in all these books is gathered together, with English letterpress, for the benefit of a young English prince who lived and died early in the seventeenth century. It was in 1607 that Edward Topsell published his version of "Four-footed Beastes." Gesner's _chef d'oeuvre_ and those of the other writers named had been on the bookshelves for many years.