[Footnote A: When a student in Germany, the writer had twelve months' drill in fencing from a French emigrant, and saw a fencing-match _à l'outrance_ between that equivocal personage the Chevalier d'Eon--then an elderly man or woman--with a young and vigorous fencing-master, an emigrant nobleman, who, like Colonna, by rapid involutions, so entangled the foil of the Chevalier, that he was at length quite exhausted, and unable to ward off the incessant attacks of his adversary. He recollects, too, a curious fact, that the Chevalier, when fencing, emitted, whenever he lunged out, a succession of sounds from the throat, which he can only compare with the short grunts of a frightened pig.--_April 1858._]
Barozzo, who had started from the ground, and now stood foaming at the mouth like a chafed panther, said nothing in reply, but seized his sword, and rushed upon his generous adversary with desperate but unavailing ferocity. I could now perceive that Colonna pressed him more hotly than before, and that his point no longer sought the corselet, but the throat of Barozzo, where indeed alone he was mortally vulnerable, and where, ere long, the death-stroke reached him. A few passes had been exchanged without a hit, when suddenly Barozzo's sword again flew from his grasp, and long before it reached the ground, Colonna's point was buried in his throat. The thrust was mortal. The steel had severed the duct of life; the hot blood bubbled out in streams; and the huge Barozzo staggered, reeled, and fell upon his back. A bloody froth now gathered round his lips, which worked with agony and rage; the life-blood ebbed apace, and soon the trunk and limbs of the colossal chieftain were stiffened in death. But even in death the dominant passions of his soul were strongly written in his livid features. His glazed and sunken eyes still glared with fiend-like malice on his conqueror, and every lineament was inwrought with reckless and insatiable ferocity.
Colonna gazed a while in solemn and impressive silence upon the foe he had destroyed. His broad forehead darkened with deep thought, and his eyes saddened with painful recollections of the beloved parent whose untimely death he had so well avenged. Soon, however, his noble features brightened with a fervent look of blended filial piety and exultation. He wiped his reeking blade upon the remnants of Barozzo's mantle, and we retraced our steps. Colonna ascended a sheep-path, and crossed the mountain to regain his boat, while I returned by a circuitous road to the villa, leaving the governor of Candia and his retinue to the vultures of the Apennine, which, with unerring ken, had espied the dead Greeks, and were already sailing in wide eddies high above the scene of blood.
