His great anxiety was now to get back to his position, and at the same time practice the very deception which had beguiled him from it. He succeeded admirably, and the British imagining his retreat to be a hasty and disorderly flight pressed after, and on coming to the creek resolved at once to attack him. Crossing the stream they ascended the opposite bank boldly, and without opposition, till within twenty yards of the top, when they were met by such a sudden and destructive volley that they broke and fled. Hiding behind trees they then kept up a harmless fire till night, when under cover of darkness they effected their retreat with the loss of nearly a hundred men, or one-third of their force, while some half dozen killed and wounded covered the loss of the Americans. This half partisan, half regular warfare, in the midst of our vast forests, combined much of the picturesque and marvellous. There was not the pomp of vast armies, nor the splendor of a great battle, but courage, skill and endurance were required, sufficient to make able commanders and veteran soldiers. The long and tedious march of a hundred miles through the snow-filled forest--the solitary block-house with its small garrison, situated in a lonely clearing, around which the leafless trees creaked and groaned in the northern blasts--the bivouack fire gleaming red through the driving storm--the paths of wild beasts crossing the wilderness in every direction, their cries of hunger mingling with the muffled sound of half frozen torrents--the war-cry of the savage and the crack of his rifle at still midnight, waking up the chilled sleepers to battle and to death--the sudden onset and the bloody hand-to-hand fight, made up the experience and history of our border warfare. Far away from the haunts of civilization, men struggled for the control of an imaginary line, and many gallant and able officers, fell ingloriously by some Indian marksman. At far intervals, stretching from the St. Lawrence to Mackinaw, the faintly heard thunder of cannon amid those vast solitudes, announced that two nations were battling for untrodden forest tracts and undisturbed sheets of water. Those tracts are now covered with towns and cities, and those sheets of water freighted with commerce. Then it was announced as a great miracle of speed, that a steamboat made four miles an hour in passing up the Ohio--now the northern lakes are ploughed with steamers, going at the rate of eighteen or twenty miles an hour, and wrapped round with railroads, over which cars are thundering with a velocity that annihilates distance, and brings into one neighborhood the remotest States. [Sidenote: April 8.]