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 best swordsman I ever saw. You ought to have seen him!' and the old trooper caught up my cane, stepped to the middle of the room, and gave a capital exhibition of thrust and stroke, guard and point. 'Why,' he resumed, 'Krueger wasn't afraid of anything on earth. ''I've seen him shoot a hungry lion dead right in the air, when it was springing straight at him; and he was no more excited than if it had been a rabbit. And I saw him once kill fifteen men with a sabre''.' 'Fifteen men with a sabre!' I echoed. 'You had no bloody wars in Holland, I think?'

No, it wasn't exactly war. It was a big meeting of one wing of a foot-regiment. What caused it I could not, for my life, make out. Well, when this meeting broke out, the two troops he and I belonged to were sent out one morning to quell it, and arrest the leaders. Just outside the barracks we met about four hundred of the mutineers, who were all armed with muskets and bayonets, but had not been able to get any cartridges. We had not been allowed to bring our fire-arms, so carried only sabres, the authorities thinking we would overawe the rioters at once. Our colonel, riding to the front, ordered the fellows to stack their arms, and give up their leaders; and I think they would have done it if one giant of a man hadn't stepped out and made a fiery speech, telling them that they were more than double our numbers; that we had no revolvers, and at last ordering them to fix bayonets and drive us off the field. We were formed into a long line two files deep, and the moment these threatening words were uttered the colonel shouted, "Draw swords! Trot! Gallop! Charge!" and we swept down on them like a whirlwind before they could form square.

In an instant their ranks were broken, but they