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Unless my recollection plays me false, he was distinctly a good talker. This is how he told the story of the 18th of June: Our regiment was marched out into a cornfield. The officers told us to lie down on the ground and wait, because the enemy had got their artillery playing on us. Cannon-balls kept coming over pretty close to the ground. If we kept flat, however, there was not much risk.
If, finally, TIME be assumed as the exponent of the dreadful magnitudes, time combining itself with motion, as in the flight of cannon-balls or the flight of swallows, the sublimity becomes greater; but horror seizes upon the reflecting intellect, and incredulity upon the irreflective.
In 1513, just before the battle of Flodden, its walls were at length laid low by James IV., but not until the famous cannon "Mons Meg" still, I believe, to be seen at Edinburgh Castle had been brought against it. One of the cannon-balls fired from "Mons Meg" was found, and is still kept with others at the Castle.
Toward evening, the ground was strewn with these gray quart mugs, which gave as perfect evidence of the battle of the day as the cannon-balls on the sand before Fort Fisher did of the contest there. Besides this, for the amusement of the crowd, there is, every day, a wheelbarrow race, a sack race, a blindfold contest, or something of the sort, which turns out to be a very flat performance.
"The first thing to do," he shouted authoritatively, "is to take good cover, so that the bullets and cannon-balls of the English cannot hit us; and then, when they have expended their ammunition, we will shout Allah! and charge them with the sword." "Well spoken!" was the cry, and the order passed up and down the line.
While the great guns were roaring, and the cannon-balls flying, Black Pedro stood amid the smoke, in his velvet suit, his black beard bristling with rage, and his face bearing an expression ten times more ferocious than his grand- father's at its worst. He noted carefully the precise moment when the scuppers were running with blood, and then gave the signal for boarding.
Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks, leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers; the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared, ground to dust under the horses.
With volley after volley the Confederates hurled cannon-balls, shells, musket, and even pistol-bullets at the flying ship, that could only be seen an instant at a time by the fitful flashes of the lightning. On the "Carondelet" all was still as death. The men knew the deadly peril they were in, and realized how impossible it was for them to make any fight.
"Winnie shall stop here to-night," said I, for Tom Faggus still said never a word all the while; but began to buckle his things on, for he knew that women are to be met with wool, as the cannon-balls were at the siege of Tiverton Castle; "mother, I tell you, Winnie shall stop; else I will go away with her, I never knew what it was, till now, to ride a horse worth riding."
Well, the projectile is the carriage of the future, and, to speak the truth, planets are only projectiles, simple cannon-balls hurled by the hand of the Creator. But to return to our vehicle. Some of you, gentlemen, may think that the speed it will travel at is excessive nothing of the kind.
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