The belfry offers you a pleasant view: the roofs and steeples of Brieg, pleasantly visible to eastward; villages dotted about, Laugwitz, Barzdorf, Hermsdorf, clear to your inquiring: and to westward, and to southward, tops of Hill-country in the distance.

Westward, twenty miles off, are pleasant Hills; and among them, if you look well, shadowy Town-spires, which you are assured are Strehlen, a place also of interest in Friedrich's History .-- Your belfry itself, in Mollwitz, is old, but not unsound; and the big iron clock grunts heavily at your ear, or perhaps bursts out in a too deafening manner, while you study the topographies.
Pampitz, too, seems prosperous, in its littery way; the Church is bigger and newer,"-- owing to an accident we shall hear of soon;--"Country all about seems farmed with some industry, but with shallow ploughing; liable to drought.

It is very sandy in quality; shorn of umbrage; painfully naked to an English eye." That is the big champaign, coated with two feet of snow, where a great Action is now to go forward.
Neipperg, all this while, is much at his ease on this white resting-day, He is just sitting down to dinner at the Dorfschulze's (Village Provost, or miniature Mayor of Mollwitz), a composed man; when--rockets or projectiles, and successive anxious sputterings from the steeple-tops of Brieg, are hastily reported: what can it mean?
Means little perhaps;--Neipperg sends out a Hussar party to ascertain, and composedly sets himself to dine.

In a little while his Hussar party will come galloping back, faster than it went; faster and fewer;--and there will be news for Neipperg during dinner! Better here looking out, though it was a rest-day ?-- The truth is, the Prussian advance goes on with punctilious exactitude, by no means rapidly.

Colonel Count van Rothenburg,--the same whom we lately heard of in Paris as a miracle of gambling,--he now here, in a new capacity, is warily leading the Vanguard of Dragoons; warily, with the Four Columns well to rear of him: the Austrian Hussar party came upon Rothenburg, not two miles from Mollwitz; and suddenly drew bridle.
Them Rothenburg tumbles to the right-about, and chases;--finds, on advancing, the Austrian Army totally unaware.