Again the trumpet-blast of war is blown: Again the cannon booms along the sea. Now, may the God of Battles stand by thee, True-hearted Denmark! struggling for thine own, For right, and loyalty, and King, and throne, Against the weight of frantic Germany! Old Honour is not dead whilst thou art free— Oh be thou faithful to thy past renown! May the great spirit of thy heroes dead Be as a bulwark to thine ancient shore: And, midst the surge of battle rolling red, Still be thy banner foremost as of yore; Prouder than when it waved, to winds outspread, On the broad bastion-keep of Elsinore! LIFE IN THE “FAR WEST.” PART IV. We have said that La Bonté was a philosopher: he took the streaks of ill luck which checkered his mountain life in a vein of perfect carelessness, if not of stoical indifference. Nothing ruffled his danger-steeled equanimity of temper; no sudden emotion disturbed his mind. We have seen how wives were torn from him without eliciting a groan or grumble, (but such _contretemps_, it may be said, can scarcely find a place in the category of ills;) how the loss of mules and mustangs, harried by horse-stealing Indians, left him in the _ne-plus-ultra_ of mountain misery—“afoot;” how packs and peltries, the hard-earned “beaver” of his perilous hunts, were “raised” at one fell swoop by freebooting bands of savages. Hunger and thirst, we know, were commonplace sensations to the mountaineer. His storm-hardened flesh scarce felt the pinging wounds of arrow-point or bullet; and when in the midst of Indian fight, it is not probable that any tender qualms of feeling would allay the itching of his fingers for his enemy’s scalp-lock, nor would any remains of civilised fastidiousness prevent his burying his knife again and again in the life-blood of an Indian savage. Still, in one dark corner of his heart, there shone at intervals a faint spark of what was once a fiercely-burning fire. Neither time, that corroder of all things, nor change, that ready abettor of oblivion, nor scenes of peril and excitement, which act as dampers to more quiet memory, could smother this little smouldering spark, which now and again—when rarely-coming calm succeeded some stirring passage in the hunter’s life, and left him, for a brief time, devoid of care and victim to his thoughts—would flicker suddenly, and light up all the nooks and corners of his rugged breast, and discover to his mind’s eye that one deep-rooted memory clung there still, though long neglected; proving that, spite of time and change, of life and fortune, “On revient toujours à ses premiers amours.”