original position; and again the conquered republicans recovered their
energy and smote their adversaries as if the contest were just begun.
The tide of battle ebbed and flowed like the waves of the sea, but it
would be mere pedantry to affect any technical explanation of its various
changes. It was a hot struggle of twenty thousand men, pent up in a
narrow space, where the very nature of the ground had made artistic
evolutions nearly impracticable. The advance, the battalia, even the
rearguard on both sides were mixed together pell-mell, and the downs were
soon covered at every step with the dead and dying-Briton, Hollander,
Spaniard, Italian, Frisian, Frenchman, Walloon, fighting and falling
together, and hotly contesting every inch of those barren sands.

It seemed, said one who fought there, as if the last day of the world had
come.

Political and religious hatred, pride of race, remembrance of a half-
century of wrongs, hope, fury, and despair; these were the real elements
contending with each other that summer's day. It was a mere trial of
ferocity and endurance, not more scientific than a fight between packs of
wolves and of bloodhounds.

No doubt the brunt of the conflict fell upon Vere, with his Englishmen
and Frisians, for this advance-guard made up nearly one-half of the
States' army actually engaged. And most nobly, indefatigably, did the
hardy veteran discharge his duty. Having personally superintended almost
all the arrangements in the morning, he fought all day in the front,
doing the work both of a field-marshal and a corporal.

He was twice wounded, shot each time through the same leg, yet still
fought on as if it were some one else's blood and not his own that was