But there was no rest for the defeated army. Silently and sullenly during these hours, they withdrew from the works at Freeman’s Farm, and huddled closely together under the three redoubts by the river. Here the women, Madam Riedesel, Lady Ackland, and others, trembled and wept over the dying Fraser. Here the hospital stood with its overflowing throng of the wounded and the dead. The great and princely army waited in doubt and despair while their commander wavered in his plans. Should he try to hold his dangerous ground, should he risk another engagement, should he retreat? The last course was chosen. On the following night a retreat began as the last minute-guns were fired magnanimously by the Americans, in honor of Fraser’s funeral, which took place at sunset. The sun fell behind the heights upon which the exultant Americans lay; heavy clouds followed, and quickly after, amid the drenching rain, the army of Burgoyne, abandoning their sick and wounded, began the retreat up the river. Retracing their steps from Bemis Heights, the scene of their disaster, they followed up the river road to the Fishkill and the Schuyler mansion, which they burned to the ground. Failing here in an attempt to make a stand against the advancing Americans, they fell back, formed an entrenched camp, and planted their batteries along the heights of old Saratoga. In this camp they still hoped to hold out until relief should come up the Hudson from New York. Here the romance and pathos of the campaign culminated, as described by Madam Riedesel, the accomplished and beautiful wife of the Hessian general, in her thrilling account of the retreat and of the agonizing days that followed. At the Marshall house, where she had taken refuge, the cannonballs thrown across the river crashed through its walls, and rolled along the floor, so that the sick and wounded were driven into the cellar where she and her children and the broken-hearted widows of the dead were suffering, watching, and starving. Frail by birth and rearing, Madam Riedesel stood in the doorway of the cellar, and with arms outspread across the open door held at bay the selfish, brutal men who would have crowded out the sick and dying. Burgoyne and his army, entrenched on the hills, and with the river below, yet had no water to drink, except a cupful brought now and then for the faint and wounded from the river by the British women, on whom the gallant Americans, ever tender toward woman, would not fire. [Illustration: CONGRESS SPRING, 1898.]