than three weeks scarce a day has passed but one or more coffins have been borne up the stony street and laid to rest in the quiet churchyard; and though the daily lessening crowd of followers, and the longsince silent volley shows that in one way the first solemn effect is rapidly wearing off, there is another respect in which it makes itself felt more strongly still. They are all our fellow-countrymen, those poor fellows whose mutilated forms we are daily bearing to the grave. Some of them are even from our own immediate neighbourhood, and wild sobs are often heard in the lofty rooms that have so strangely changed their destination, as one or other of our neighbours look their last on husband or brother or son. Death, too, who had held his sickle back so long that we had almost hoped it had lost its edge, is reaping his harvest now more and more busily. Our little resources, too, are almost at an end; and our surgeons, who have been providing wine and other stimulants from their own scanty means, have applied in vain to headquarters for the necessary aid, and meeting only with a rough refusal, are compelled to hold their hand. We are growing sullen and out of heart. Even the long-desired left bank of the Rhine,

which we now look upon as ours beyond all fear of restitution, brings with it but a very small amount of consolation. The war, too, is not over, after all-nay, more, it is even now hungering for more men, and bitter is the lamentation as the iron mandate reaches us for the rendering up of some hard-working father of a family, some widow's only son. We hold our tongue, it is true, in the presence of the almost ubiquitous police; but when it does dare to wag it utters bitter things things ominous for the future peace of Germany, should all not go for the future as well for our masters as it has hitherto gone.

And so, in sullenness and gloom the year closes in, and in a very few more weeks the few straggling visitors who still remain, and whose open purses have hitherto richly aided us in our distress, will have fled, and the deserted watering-place will be left with empty hands to bring her two hundred wounded through the bitter winter as best she may. What the next three months may bring forth no man can tell; but it is more than possible that there are some strange experiences in store for Sitzbad even yet, before the final close of this grim year of 1870.