Burlesques William Makepeace Thackeray

33
This was too much. "Here goes!" said I, and rode slap at him.
There was a shriek of terror from the whole of the French army, and I should think at least
forty thousand guns were levelled at me in an instant. But as the muskets were not loaded,
and the cannon had only wadding in them, these facts, I presume, saved the life of Phil
Fogarty from this discharge.
Knowing my horse, I put him at the Emperor's head, and Bugaboo went at it like a shot. He
was riding his famous white Arab, and turned quite pale as I came up and went over the
horse and the Emperor, scarcely brushing the cockade which he wore.
"Bravo!" said Murat, bursting into enthusiasm at the leap.
"Cut him down!" said Sieyes, once an Abbe, but now a gigantic Cuirassier; and he made a
pass at me with his sword. But he little knew an Irishman on an Irish horse. Bugaboo
cleared Sieyes, and fetched the monster a slap with his near hind hoof which sent him
reeling from his saddle,—and away I went, with an army of a hundred and seventy-three
thousand eight hundred men at my heels. * * * *
BARBAZURE.
BY G. P. R. JEAMES, ESQ., ETC.
I.
It was upon one of those balmy evenings of November, which are only known in the
valleys of Languedoc and among the mountains of Alsace, that two cavaliers might have
been perceived by the naked eye threading one of the rocky and romantic gorges that skirt
the mountain-land between the Marne and the Garonne. The rosy tints of the declining
luminary were gilding the peaks and crags which lined the path, through which the
horsemen wound slowly; and as these eternal battlements with which Nature had hemmed
in the ravine which our travellers trod, blushed with the last tints of the fading sunlight, the
valley below was gray and darkling, and the hard and devious course was sombre in
twilight. A few goats, hardly visible among the peaks, were cropping the scanty herbage
here and there. The pipes of shepherds, calling in their flocks as they trooped homewards to
their mountain villages, sent up plaintive echoes which moaned through those rocky and
lonely steeps; the stars began to glimmer in the purple heavens spread serenely overhead
and the faint crescent of the moon, which had peered for some time scarce visible in the