The next day the mournful sequel to this tragedy followed, when the crews of both fleets, victors and vanquished, joined in burying their dead on the shore of the bay. The sailors slain in the battle had been already sunken in the lake, but now to the sound of the minute guns from the ships, with the sad music of funeral marches, the measured dip of oars, and the flutter of half-masted flags, the last sad rites were paid to the fallen officers. Perhaps the Indians under Tecumseh who had seen with stupid dismay the great battle of the rival squadrons, witnessed this pathetic spectacle too, before they sullenly withdrew into Canada after Proctor’s army. There Harrison pursued them, and in his victory on the banks of the Thames, their mighty chieftain fell, and their cause perished with him. XIX. A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC. “Who is Blennerhassett?” asked William Wirt, at the trial of Aaron Burr for treason, and many a schoolboy since has echoed the question, as many a schoolboy will hereafter, while impassioned oratory is music to the ear and witchery to the breast. The eloquent lawyer went on to answer himself, and painted in glowing colors a character which history sees in a colder light. But though Blennerhassett was not the ideal that Wirt imagined, he was the generous victim of a cold and selfish man’s ambition, and the ruin of his happy home and gentle hope is none the less pathetic because his own folly was partly to blame for it. We must go back of the events which we have been following to an earlier date, if we wish to find Harman Blennerhassett dwelling with his beautiful wife on their fairy island in the Ohio. Their earthly paradise lay in the larger stream at the mouth of the Kanawha, not far from the present town of Belpre, and there in the first year of the century, Blennerhassett built a mansion which became the wonder of the West. The West was not then very well able to judge of the magnificence which it celebrated, but there seems no reason to doubt that Blennerhassett’s mansion was fine, and of a grandeur unexampled in that new country where most men lived in log cabins, and where any framed house was a marvel. He was of English birth, but of Irish parentage, and to the ardor of his race he added the refinement of an educated taste. He was a Trinity College man, and one of his classmates at Dublin was the Irish patriot, Emmet, who afterwards suffered death for his country. But it does not appear that Blennerhassett came to America for political reasons, and he seems to have made his home in the West from the impulse of a poetic nature, with the wealth and the leisure to realize the fancies of his dream. “A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied,” says Wirt, “blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and her nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures before him. A philosophical apparatus offers him all the secrets and mysteries of nature.