186 HOR^ POLONIC^. 



siderable execution. Our application met with no success, and we were 

 doomed to curse our misfortune in having been commissioned to hospitals 

 in the first instance, not that our situation was at all irksome, but then it 

 was not as interesting as our excited anticipations had promised. From 

 six o'clock in the morning until noon was occupied at our respective 

 hospitals, when fatigue and the impure atmosphere obliged us to rest for 

 two or three hours ; at five we met a party to dinner, and spent the 

 evening in dancing or walking in the gardens under rows of shady 

 trees. 



A few days previous to the battle of Ostralenka, we witnessed the 

 execution of a nobleman, who, having been tried by a court-martial, was 

 found guilty of espionage and covertly sending information to the 

 Russians. He petitioned the Senate for a revision of the sentence ; I 

 was in the Senate-house when the petition and his defence were read, 

 but without efTect. In company with some officers I witnessed his 

 execution, submitted to with a manly fortitude which would have done 

 honour to a better cause. The tragical scene took place in a sandy plain, 

 adjoining the suburbs of Warsaw, whither the traitor was escorted by a 

 troop of the National Guard. He was a fine noble-looking man, with 

 the characteristic Polish eye, rather aqueline nose, and upon the whole 

 a prepossessing countenance. 



" Skill'd to grace 



A devil's purpose with an angel's face." 



When placed upon the stool surmounting the scaflfbld, I narrowly 

 scrutinized his features, upon which scorn and contempt seemed to 

 obliterate all fear of death j hatred seemed paramount to the conscious- 

 ness of his awful situation. The priest having as I supposed given him 

 absolution, and muttered a few prayers — the executioner having stripped 

 oflf the upper garments and exposed the symmetrical shoulders, neck, 

 and chest of his victim, stood behind him, resting on a huge sword with 

 which traitors had been decapitated in the days of Sobieski, whose name 

 it bore — still I could detect no alteration of countenance, except in the 

 spectators, and when the criminal with perfect sang froid had taken one 



Einch of snuff, and was, as I thought, in the act of taking a second, a 

 low from the executioner intervened, and at one stroke his head rolled 

 upon the scaffold. 



Although the numbers we daily witnessed falling victims to cholera 

 morbus and their wounds had generated in us a contempt of death and 

 indifference to life, I was particularly affected by the loss of a friend 

 named Dufois, who had an attack of fever, attended with great con- 

 gestion in the head, for which I was anxious to bleed him ; but wishing to 

 nave the opinion of some one more conversant with the treatment of the 

 fever as it then raged than myself, I called in one of the most celebrated 

 of the physicians practising in Warsaw. He would, however, by no 

 means hear of any depletion, either by bleeding or medicine, and con- 

 tented himself by prescribing some simple febrifuge powder, which, 

 far from fulfilling the intention of the prescriber, caused the loss of much 

 valuable time, when more energetic measures might have, in all pro- 

 bability, subdued the disease. The approach of night was the harbinger 

 of violent delirium; I sat hour after hour by his bedside, forcibly 

 controlling the violence of his phrenzied actions, and earnestly hoping 

 that the burning heat which pervaded his frame and that raging fever 

 which, in imparting more than natural strength to his feeble body. 



