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Updated: May 31, 2025
I was spending a few days with an old friend, at a little house he calls his Hermitage, in a Western valley; we had walked out, had passed the bridge, and had stood awhile to see the clear stream flowing, a vein of reflected sapphire, among the green water-meadows; we had climbed up among the beech-woods, through copses full of primroses, to a large heathery hill, where a clump of old pines stood inside an ancient earth-work.
Her only food was the wormy bread and half-cured pork which was served out to the soldiers, and her drink was brackish water from the ditch that surrounded the earth-work. The cannonading during the day was so furious that the fort was often almost reduced to ruins, but in the night the destruction was repaired.
They are coming with their whole force!" he shouted, as he stood on the ramparts, his sword in his hand and his eye flashing with the glorious light of battle. Matches were burning, the cocks of the fusees raised, and the Virginians stood cool and undaunted. There came a puff of smoke from the palisades at Jamestown, a heavy report of a cannon, and an iron ball struck the earth-work.
Westward, less bold and jagged, but still a mighty barrier in almost any other companionship, are the sister heights of Bolivar, scarred and seamed with earth-work and rifle-pit, and bristling with abattis and battery.
Fortunately the front line trench on the left was still in existence, and could be used instead of the tunnels. Finally, Northampton trench was literally obliterated in the centre, and a famous "island" traverse, no small earth-work, so completely wiped out that we could never afterwards discover its exact whereabouts.
On this scene, this red town with the great spire, set down among water-meadows, encircled by paler green chalk hills, I look from the top of the inner and highest rampart or earth-work; or going a little distance down sit at ease on the turf to gaze at it by the hour.
And just here I may be permitted to suggest that the remarkable feature of the great earth-work serpent of Adams county, Ohio, which has been regarded as the "symbolic egg," and which in its latest phase has become the issue of a frog and the prey of the serpent, is possibly intended for the heart of the serpent, the so-called frog being the head.
Picture a slightly undulating country covered with thick low forest; a narrow road that by an open plank bridge crosses a wide, sluggish stream with marshy banks, and curves beyond abruptly to the right to avoid a low, steep hill facing the bridge; crowning this hill an earth-work, rude to be sure, but steep, sodded, almost impregnable to men without artillery to play upon it; within, two cannon, for which there is plenty of ammunition, and six hundred Confederate soldiers, fresh, eager, determined; on the road in front of the battery, but just out of range of its guns, the Union forces halting under arms, the leaders anxious and discouraged, the men exhausted, careworn, wondering what is to be done next, heartily sick of it all, yet willing to do their best; in the thicket on both sides the road, not sheltered, only covered, within pistol-shot of the enemy, six hundred United States soldiers, a Massachusetts colored regiment, one of the first recruited, without cannon, over-marched, overheated, a forlorn hope, sent forward to take the battery!
The court party were galled by the heavy fire of arrows kept up by the apprentices along the side of the moat, and finding all his efforts to regain the earth-work useless, Pembroke withdrew his forces into the castle, and in spite of the efforts of the besiegers managed to close the gates in their faces.
Perhaps the very nature that most resists, suffers also the most severely from such shocks, as a granite wall cracks and splinters to the round shot, while an earth-work accepts that rushing missile with a stolid harmless thud. Dick's composition was at least not earthy enough to let him go to bed after this recent downfall of his hopes.
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