The house within the fort at Longone is now as bare as that at Portoferraio. The place, however, is interesting, for it was with the excuse of repairing the fortifications there that the Emperor supplied himself with guns and ammunition; while the ostensible sale, at Genoa, Leghorn, and other places, of the old iron found in the fort, afforded him an additional means of communication with the Continent. He was very frequently at Longone while maturing the final details of his escape. Notwithstanding his apparent affability towards the Elbans, intended, we must believe, rather to mislead outsiders than the people themselves, Napoleon was not popular in the island. Being in continual want of money he was obliged to tax the people beyond their resources; and they naturally saw clearly that, whatever he might say and however condescending he might show himself, the money he drew from them was by no manner of means applied to the improvement of their position. His tax-gatherers were insulted; riots took place in the very churches when the priests gave out the date by which the taxes were to be sent in; in one village troops were billeted on the inhabitants until the last penny should be paid. The cries of “_Vive l’Empereur!_” which had originally greeted him on his various expeditions, ceased to be heard. Before matters reached a veritable climax, however, Napoleon had played out his part, and had left the island in which he had landed with so many fine promises. He had shown himself a clever actor, a skilful intriguer to the outside world of European diplomacy; debauched, tyrannical and exacting to the inner Elban world, into which foreign diplomats could pry with difficulty. In his vices, in his astuteness, in his ambition, Napoleon, as he revealed himself in the island of Elba, moves backwards through history, and takes his place beside the Borgia, the Orsini, the Medici of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of the caricatures of the period the most interesting is the grimly ingenious German portrait of the Conqueror, to which the following explanation is attached: The hat is the Russian eagle which has gripped with its talons and will not leave go; the face is composed of the bodies of some of the thousands he has sacrificed to his ambition; the collar is the torrent of blood shed for his vain-glory; the coat is a bit of the map of the confederation arrayed against him and of his lost battlefields. On his shoulder, in the guise of an epaulet, is the great hand of God, which plucks the cobweb and destroys the spider that fills the place where a heart should have been. FUGITIVE PIECES A TALE FROM THE BORDERLAND “WELL, it is a story to take or to leave. I tell it you as it happened to me. Think what you like about it.”