Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/422

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Napoleon.

me as significant, eloquent, almost a revelation, and an appeal by dead Napoleon to that recognition from history which history has been so ready to give him.

I.

WATERLOO.

Next to this scene, the most impressive picture I have ever been enabled to form in my mind of Napoleon's personality, was from a story of Kielland, the great Norwegian writer. In his "Tales of Two Countries,"[1] there is a description of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. I omit nearly all the setting, for it is irrelevant to my purpose. Suffice it to say that a young man named Cousin Hans desires to become acquainted with a pretty young woman, and that the only way he can contrive to do so is to make himself the victim of the man he supposes to be her father, a retired captain, who has bored more than one generation by his accounts of the battle of Waterloo. Cousin Hans places himself in the way of the captain, and to attract the old soldier's interest, makes believe that he is studying military manoeuvres by drawing strokes and angles in the sands. This is what follows:

"The whole esplanade was quiet and deserted. Cousin Hans could hear the captain's firm steps approaching; they came right up to him and stopped. Hans did not look up; the captain

  1. " Tales of Two Countries." From the Norwegian of Alexander L. Kielland. Translated by William Archer. (London: Osgood, Mcllvaine.)