It was but ten years since we had first heard of this man with the curious Italian name--think of it, ten years, the time that it takes for a private to become a non-commissioned officer, or a clerk to win a fifty-pound advance in his salary.

He had sprung in an instant out of nothing into everything.

One month people were asking who he was, the next he had broken out in the north of Italy like the plague; Venice and Genoa withered at the touch of this swarthy ill-nourished boy.

He cowed the soldiers in the field, and he outwitted the statesmen in the council chamber.

With a frenzy of energy he rushed to the east, and then, while men were still marvelling at the way in which he had converted Egypt into a French department, he was back again in Italy and had beaten Austria for the second time to the earth.