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Especially the indefatigable Philip Fleming-auditor and secretary of Ostend before and during the siege, bravest, most conscientious, and most ingenious of clerks has chronicled faithfully in his diary almost every cannon-shot that was fired, house that was set on fire, officer that was killed, and has pourtrayed each new machine that was invented or imagined by native or foreign genius.
Now, we know that whatever D'Artagnan did examine, according to custom, daylight was certain to illuminate. As to the officer, now grown mute again, he had full time for meditation. Therefore, on putting his foot on board his vessel, moored within cannon-shot of the island, the captain of the musketeers had already got together all his means, offensive and defensive.
When Israel Putnam, his comrade in the last war, saw from the rebel breastwork the old man striding, gun in hand, up the hill, he shouted, "By God, Pomeroy, you here! A cannon-shot would waken you out of your grave!" But Pomeroy, with other landsmen, crowded in the small and malodorous fishing-vessels that were made to serve as transports, was now in the gripe of the most unheroic of maladies.
He knows accurately of the Schwerin Column, of the comfortable Bevern Victory at Reichenberg, and how they have got the Jung-Bunzlau Magazine, and are across the Elbe, their bridges all secured, though with delay of one day; and do now wait only for the word, for the three cannon-shot, in fact, which are to signify that Friedrich is actually crossing to their side of Lower Moldau.
Farther away, in the villages of Rahna, of Kaya, and of Klein-Gorschen, all was motion, but we were the first the Prussians would fall upon. The enemy halted about twice a cannon-shot off, and the cavalry swarmed by hundreds up the hill to reconnoitre us.
From the Konigstein they duly fire off the two Cannon-shot, as signal that we are coming; signal which Browne, just in the act of departing, never heard, owing to the piping of the winds and rattling of the rain. "Advance, my heroes!" counsel they: "You cannot drag your ammunitions, say you; your poor couple of big guns?
All purely military display had been forbidden at the magnificent court around Napoleon. Murat and King Jerome themselves had been ordered to their head-quarters, yet the couriers followed each other night and day, frequently disturbing the brilliant fetes by the fear of the first cannon-shot ready to go off.
When some of them were on board my ship, I caused one of the guns to be fired off, which threw them into a dreadful panic; and their terror was much increased on being told that one cannon-shot could kill an hundred men. On which account, they alleged that it must be something belonging to the devil.
For close upon three years past a Spanish army had been investing by land the town and fortress of Gibraltar; a strong squadron was cruising out of cannon-shot of the place, incessantly engaged in barring the passage against the English vessels.
I had not heard it, but I understood instantly the significance of the inquiry. A cannon-shot meant that there was a ship in sight from the beacon-tower at the mouth of the river. We were accustomed, every spring, to get our earliest news from the civilised world through American whaling vessels, which resort at that season of the year to the Okhotsk Sea.
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