The Child of Waterloo, or, The Horrors of the Battle-Field — page 151: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

143 THE CHILD OF WATERLOO, her. The battle was lost; that last grand, decisive charge had taken place, when all the scattered cavalry met in terrific col- lision. Light cavalry and heavy dragoons, cuirassiers and lancers, all were intermingled, without order or precedence. Thousands fell, and among them—my son! He fell,” said the old man, with much emotion, ‘‘as he always wished to fall, upon the battle-field, gloriously, his face to the foe!” Henry felt that this was not a time to intrude a remark upon the sorrow-stricken man. With a tact beyond his years, he knew that if the mourner found not sufficient philosophy within his own heart to stem the current of his grief, it could be given him by no one. The old man was silent for many minutes, and then stretching forth his hand, he took Henry’s in his grasp. and said, gently: ‘*My young friend, I thank you for this silent sympathy; it speaks to me more eloquently than any words in which you could have'clothed feeling. The pang is past, and I can now proceed more calmly.” ‘** Perhaps at another time,” said Henry, ‘* you will be more inclined to furnish me with the sequel of a narrative that has already excited my warmest sympathies.” ‘*No, no; no time like the present. If I told you not all now, I should feel the weight of what I had to tell pressing heavily upon me. [ will goon now. The tale is nearly over; but yet its strangest portion has yet to come.” After a pause, the old man continued, and he spoke more com- posedly by far than he had done before. It seensed as if, up to the point when he had told how his son had fallen, he had labored in his narrative, andit had been a pain to him of no ordinary character to bring it to its climax. Now, however, that was passed, and he proceeded with more spirit and determi- nation. ‘You must understand, my friend, that these particulars which I communicate to you found their way to my ears through the medium of a brother officer of my son’s, in whom Adolphe had placed the greatest confidence, and toward whom he felt all the affection of a most attached friend. This officer was wounded likewise, but not severely; and although it was a wound which put a stop to his locomotion, yet it was not suffi- cient to prevent him, at a distance, from being a spectator of various events that had occurred upon the field of battle. It was toward evening then, and the scattered host of the French army was flying before the Prussian cavalry, which came com- paratively fresh into the field against them. My son’s wounds were not mortal, and he lay for some hours seeming «lead, but really only in a trance, upon that field of blood. Marie, from the first moment that she had been roughly told he had fallen at the head of his regiment, had, with the despair of death depicted upon her countenance, flown to seek him amidstithe dead and the dying. Grasping her infant to her breast, and witb a feeling of despair at her heart that enabled her to tread without sickening, e’en through the pools of blood and the mangled corpses that strewed the plain, she sought the chosen of her heart. At last comicbooks. com