came to grief, which is such a casualty as does not happen every day,
and I don't blame people for making the most of it. Then the moral was
pointed, the tale adorned, and the impression deepened, solemnized, and
struck home by the fact that the very horse concerned in the "casualty"
was to be fastened behind our coach, and the whole population came out
with interns and umbrellas to tie him on,--all but one man, who was
deaf, and stood on the piazza, anxious and eager to know everything
that had been and was still occurring, and yet sorry to give trouble,
and so compromising the matter and making it worse, as compromisers
generally do, by questioning everybody with a deprecating, fawning air.
Item. We shall all, if we live long enough, be deaf, but we need not
be meek about it. I for one am determined to walk up to people and
demand what they are saying at the point of the bayonet. Deafness, if
it must be so, but independence at any rate.
And when the fulness of time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry
Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming
of Johnson's cannon, the rattle of Dieskan's guns, and that wild
war-whoop, more terrible than all. Again old Monro watches from his
fortress-walls the steadily approaching foe, and looks in vain for
help, save to his own brave heart. I see the light of conquest shining
in his foeman's eye, darkened by the shadow of the fate that waits his
coming on a bleak Northern hill but, generous in the hour of victory,
he shall not be less noble in defeat,--for to generous hearts all
generous hearts are friendly, whether they stand face to face or side
by side.
Over the woods and the waves, when the morning breaks, like a
bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to
run a race, comes up the sun in his might and crowns himself king. All
the summer day, from morn to dewy eve, we sail over the lakes of
Paradise. Blue waters, and blue sky, soft clouds and green islands,
and fair, fruitful shores, sharp-pointed hills, long, gentle slopes and
swells, and the lights and shadows of far-stretching woods; and over
all the potence of the unseen past, the grand, historic past,--soft
over all the invisible mantle which our fathers flung at their
departing,--the mystic effluence of the spirits that trod these wilds
and sailed these waters,--the courage and the fortitude, the hope that
battled against hope, the comprehensive outlook, the sagacious purpose,
the resolute will, the unhesitating self-sacrifice, the undaunted
devotion which has made this heroic ground; cast these into your own
glowing crucible, O gracious friend, and crystallize for yourself such
a gem of days as shall worthily be set forever in your crown of the
beatitudes.
PART III.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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