No: the lion-like Ney did not teach school in North Carolina; he died a dog’s death in the garden of the Luxembourg. A victim to the cold perfidy of Wellington, a bloody sacrifice to the vindictive ferocity of Bourbon royalism, the magnificent French soldier was shot to death by Frenchmen--shot like a dog, and fell on his battle-worn face dead, dead, while the song of birds was in the trees, and the innocent laughter of children rang in his ears. Well did he say when they were reading his death-sentence, in which all of his high-sounding titles were being enumerated, “Just Michel Ney--soon to be a handful of dust.” Full of error, yet full of virtue: pure gold at one crisis, mere dross at another; superbly great on some occasions, and pitiably weak on others; true as steel one day, unsubstantial as water the next; dangerous to the enemy on some fields, fatally dangerous to Napoleon in the last campaign, the truth remains that this strenuous soldier had been fighting the battles of France all his life, had never failed her at any trial, had never joined her enemies, and must have died of heart-break as well as bullet-wound when he heard a French officer give the word, and saw French soldiers raise their guns to shoot him down. Honor to the son of Ney who refused to take the hand of Wellington’s son, although a Queen was the hostess, and an Emperor whispered a remonstrance! Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Page 40: “Auerstadt” was printed that way.