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This was a most critical campaign, and required more prudence and caution than I ever possessed in the whole course of my life. In such a country you could not tell but your next step might be in the cannon's mouth. I was thus thinking, when I saw the adjutant running towards the centre of the regiment, vociferating, "Pass the word for Mr. Shipp; pass the word for Mr. Shipp."
"When Yankee meets the Briton Whose blood congenial flows, By Heaven created to be friends By fortune reckoned foes: Hard then must be the battle fray E'er well the fight is o'er, Now they ride, side by side, While the bell'wing thunders roar, While the cannon's fire is flashing fast And the bell'wing thunders roar.
Nevertheless, she remembered a peculiar glance of Tom's to his father on the previous day, when George Cannon's name had been mentioned. "Well," said he. "You surprise me! That's all!" "But " She stopped, full of misgivings. "Never heard any gossip about me never?" he persisted, as it were, menacing her. She shook her head. "Never heard that I'm not really a solicitor?"
Jacob Cannon slightly bowed his head, and spoke aloud from an inner communion: "Forgive me, mother, that I make the comparison! Thy frugal oil, that burned with pure and lonely widow's flame at Cannon's Ferry window, the traveller hailed with comfort in his heart, and blessed the enterprise. But to compound the equation another unknown quantity of female force arose beside my mother's lamp.
Her innocence and spirit, self-respect and awakened womanly consciousness, weakness and sensibility, mettle and beauty, presented themselves by turns; and the cold, woodeny room, the neglected tavern, the autumn night wind coming down the chimney and starting the fire, all seemed instinctive, like him, with mischief, as if Patty Cannon's soul flew astraddle of a broom and led a hundred witches.
The man who would face a cannon's mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could crumple with one hand. The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty met the train. The local operator had not divulged to any one the contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators on the platform.
No veteran had ever marched more hopelessly into a cannon's mouth than he had approached the door of that kitchen. And yet a flood of thankfulness, the direct reflex of his first impotent rage, threatened to sweep up and drown the fires of his wrath.
We feel that we are helpless aliens in a strange country. At all ages we shrink back involuntarily from the unknown. And a young man is very much like the soldier who will walk up to the cannon's mouth, and is put to flight by a ghost. He hesitates among the maxims of the world.
"Do I look as though I would seek the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth?" Brook laughed. "Am I full of strange oaths?" "Oh, that's ridiculous, you know!" exclaimed Clare. "I mean, you look as though you would fight." "I never would if I could help it. And so far I have managed 'to help it' very well. I'm naturally mild, I think. You are not, you know.
Besides the two forts of St. Maria and St. Philip, which terminated the bridge on either shore, and the two wooden bastions on the bridge itself, which were filled with soldiers and mounted with guns on all sides, each of the two-and-thirty vessels was manned with thirty soldiers and four sailors, and showed the cannon's mouth to the enemy, whether he carne up from Zealand or down from Antwerp.
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