Accurate intelligence having been obtained from a party of scouts, who had been dispatched early in the morning to track their course, that the British General with his troops and Indians had finally departed, preparations were made about midday for the interment of the fallen. Two large graves were accordingly dug on the outer brow of the ravine, and in these the bodies of the fallen soldiers were deposited, with all the honors of war. A smaller grave, within the fort, and near the spot where they so nobly fell, was considerately allotted to Cranstoun and Middlemore. There was a composedness on the brow of the former that likened him, even in death, to the living man; while, about the good-humored mouth of poor Middlemore, played the same sort of self-satisfied smile that had always been observable there when about to deliver himself of a sally. Gerald, who had imposed upon himself the painful duty of attending to their last committal to earth, could not help fancying that Middlemore must have breathed his last with an inaudible pun upon his lips--an idea that inexpressibly affected him. Weighed down with sorrow as was his own soul, he had yet a tear for the occasion--not that his brave comrades were dead, but that they had died with so much to attach them to life--while he whose hope was in death alone, had been chained, as by a curse to an existence compared with which death was the first of human blessings. On the following morning, after an early breakfast, he and Captain Jackson quitted the fort, Colonel Forrester--who had not failed to remark that the brusque manner of his aide-de-camp was not altogether understood by his charge--taking occasion at parting, to assure the latter that, with all his eccentricity, he was a kind-hearted man, whom he had selected to be near him more for his personal courage, zeal, and general liberality of feeling, than for any qualifications of intellect he possessed.