I stood on the pavement till it was quite lost to eye and ear in the
distance.
With a deep sigh, I then turned, my white rose folded in my
handkerchief--the little parting _gage_--the
Favor secret, sweet, and precious,
which no mortal eye but hers and mine had seen conveyed to me.
The care of the host of the Belle Etoile, and his assistants, had raised
the wounded hero of a hundred fights partly against the wall, and
propped him at each side with portmanteaus and pillows, and poured a
glass of brandy, which was duly placed to his account, into his big
mouth, where, for the first time, such a godsend remained unswallowed.
A bald-headed little military surgeon of sixty, with spectacles, who had
cut off eighty-seven legs and arms to his own share, after the battle of
Eylau, having retired with his sword and his saw, his laurels and his
sticking-plaster to this, his native town, was called in, and rather
thought the gallant Colonel's skull was fractured; at all events, there
was concussion of the seat of thought, and quite enough work for his
remarkable self-healing powers to occupy him for a fortnight.
I began to grow a little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my
excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see,
heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine.
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