logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no
greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The
ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of
metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and
those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted
corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long,
that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make
them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a
baby. If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a
moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the
spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly
soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and
window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and
would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and
would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and
would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill,
and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the
rickyard high with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground,
where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight.

Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in
one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a
honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn morning, there were
sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily
together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing
on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their
work to look down, and share their enjoyment. It was a pleasant,
lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the two
girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and
gaiety of their hearts.