Trumpets and drums instantaneously broke the stillness of the march. Their martial notes reverberated over the surrounding solitudes in enlivening peals. The ill-omened birds of night flapped their wings, and swooped through the unsteady lights of the scene in utter dismay at this untimely invasion of their prescriptive dominions. These were quickly followed by a discharge of musketry, poured into the formidable palisade. It was scarcely discharged, however, before Bacon discovered the utter uselessness of such a waste of ammunition. He saw that the breastwork was so constructed, that, while it admitted of the discharge of missiles from within, it afforded a secure protection to its occupants against the musketry of their assailants. In the mean time his soldiers were exposed to the murderous discharges of poisoned arrows. In this emergency no time was to be lost; placing himself, therefore, at the head of his troops, he ordered the walls to be torn down. These, as before related, were composed of large trees piled one upon another, with their green boughs still protruding in many places over the shallow intrenchment, and the earth excavated from the latter thrown up on the outside against a rude wicker-work of fine bushes, filling up the interstices of the trees. Trumpets sounded the charge, and the columns moved at a quick pace to the onset. Still not a savage head was seen until they had arrived at the very borders of the intrenchment. Here some two hundred of the stoutest and ablest bodied of his soldiers were marched up to the projecting limbs of the largest tree, forming the basis of the breastwork. Bacon saw at a glance that if he could manage to seize hold of these projecting arms and turn the tree across the fosse, it would at once open the way for his mounted troops, and perhaps carry with it some forty or fifty feet of the palisade, and thereby bring the opposing armies face to face. They had already seized the projecting limbs, and were shaking the frail protection of the savages to its very foundations, when simultaneously a thousand lights gleamed over forest, hill, and dale--A thousand voices united their shrill clamours in one deafening yell of savage ferocity. The troops engaged in tearing down the breastwork instinctively loosed their hold, and flew to their arms, as they threw their eyes upward to the spot whence these blinding lights and deafening noises came. It was but the work of an instant, for little more time were they permitted to examine,--they were called upon to act, and that vigorously, for their own preservation. In a single instant, and apparently at a given signal, the whole of the rude terrace surmounting the fortification literally swarmed with painted warriors, each bearing in his left hand a pine torch, and in the other, a tomahawk, a war-club, or a battle-axe.[6] They sprang from their commanding position into the midst of their assailants, and