160.]--hears unexpected human noises, and huge grinding and trampling; the four thousand, in long fleet of sledges, scouring across it, in that manner.

All day they rush along,--out of the rimy hazes of morning into the olive-colored clouds of evening again,--with huge loud-grinding rumble;--and do arrive in time at Gilge.

A notable streak of things, shooting across those frozen solitudes, in the New-Year, 1679;--little short of Karl Gustav's feat, which we heard of, in the other or Danish end of the Baltic, twenty years ago, when he took Islands without ships.
This Second Exploit--suggested or not by that prior one of Karl Gustav on the ice--is still a thing to be remembered by Hohenzollerns and Prussians.

The Swedes were beaten here, on Friedrich Wilhelm's rapid arrival; were driven into disastrous rapid retreat Northward; which they executed, in hunger and cold; fighting continually, like Northern bears, under the grim sky; Friedrich Wilhelm sticking to their skirts,--holding by their tail, like an angry bear-ward with steel whip in his hand.

A thing which, on the small scale, reminds one of Napoleon's experiences.
Not till Napoleon's huge fighting-flight, a hundred and thirty-four years after, did I read of such a transaction in those parts.