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sit amidst the ruins and smile. Truly we were not born to enjoy, but to
submit, and to hope.
Will not the reader tire, if I should minutely describe our long-drawn
journey from Paris to Geneva? If, day by day, I should record, in the form
of a journal, the thronging miseries of our lot, could my hand write, or
language afford words to express, the variety of our woe; the hustling and
crowding of one deplorable event upon another? Patience, oh reader! whoever
thou art, wherever thou dwellest, whether of race spiritual, or, sprung
from some surviving pair, thy nature will be human, thy habitation the
earth; thou wilt here read of the acts of the extinct race, and wilt ask
wonderingly, if they, who suffered what thou findest recorded, were of
frail flesh and soft organization like thyself. Most true, they were--
weep therefore; for surely, solitary being, thou wilt be of gentle
disposition; shed compassionate tears; but the while lend thy attention to
the tale, and learn the deeds and sufferings of thy predecessors.
Yet the last events that marked our progress through France were so full of
strange horror and gloomy misery, that I dare not pause too long in the
narration. If I were to dissect each incident, every small fragment of a
second would contain an harrowing tale, whose minutest word would curdle
the blood in thy young veins. It is right that I should erect for thy
instruction this monument of the foregone race; but not that I should drag
thee through the wards of an hospital, nor the secret chambers of the
charnel-house. This tale, therefore, shall be rapidly unfolded. Images of
destruction, pictures of despair, the procession of the last triumph of
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