the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and
gave a ghastly stare into his face. The boy,--it must have been a
nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and betokening a
sensitive and impressible nature rather than a hardened one,--the boy
uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow
upon the head.

I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This one circumstance has
borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.

Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
died there. There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
hundred yards in breadth--which extends between the battle-field and
the northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and
orchard. Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood
an Indian village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants
must have drawn so large a part of their substance. The site is
identified by the spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other
implements of war, labor, and the chase, which the plough turns up
from the soil. You see a splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a