The recent escape of Napoleon at the outposts was already known far and near, and formed the great topic of conversation, in which, I felt hurt to remark, no mention of the part I took was ever made, although there were at least a dozen different versions of the accident. In one, his Majesty was represented to have rode down upon and sabred the advanced picket; in another, it was the Prussians who fired, he having penetrated within their lines to reconnoitre,--each agreeing in the one great fact, that the feat was something which no one save himself could have done or thought of. As for me, I felt it was not my part to speak of the incident at all until his Majesty should first do so. I listened, therefore, with due patience and some amusement to the various narratives about me; which served to show me, by one slight instance, the measure of that exaggeration with which the Emperor's name was ever treated, and convinced me that it required not time nor distance to color every incident of his life with the strongest hues of romance. The topic was a fruitful and favorite one; and certainly few subjects could with more propriety season the hours around a bivouac fire than the exploits of the Emperor Napoleon. Among those whose reminiscences went farthest back was an old sergeant-major of infantry,--a seared and seamed and weather-beaten little fellow, who, from fatigues and privations, was dried up to a mass of tendons and fibres. This little man presented one of those strange mixtures with which the army abounded,--the shrewdest common sense on all ordinary topics, with a most credulous faith in any story where Napoleon's name occurred. It seemed, indeed, as though that one element, occurring in any tale, dispensed at once with the rules which govern belief in common cases. The invulnerability of the Emperor was with him a fruitful theme; and he teemed with anecdotes of the Egyptian and Italian campaigns, in which it was incontestably shown that neither shot nor shell had any effect upon him. But of all the superstitions regarding Napoleon, none had such complete hold on his imagination, nor was more implicitly believed by him, than the story of that little “Red Man,” who, it was asserted, visited the Emperor the night before each great battle, and arranged with him the manoeuvres of the succeeding day.