United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Besides these, when the expedition started, there were twenty gunboats, each carrying one fieldpiece, from 24's to 9-pounders; or, in some cases, howitzers. "By all these means," wrote Douglas on July 21st, "our acquiring an absolute dominion over Lake Champlain is not doubted of." The expectation was perfectly sound.
The authorities, however, were of the opinion that human hands had something to do with the explosions, and they resorted to deep-laid stratagems to get hold of the said hands. One of their traps came very near catching us. They artfully caused an old brass fieldpiece to be left on a wharf near the scene of our late operations.
I therefore took a few shots with Hale's rockets, one of which just grazed the rump of an elephant, and sent them off in great astonishment. We then tried a few shots with the fieldpiece, but the gun made bad practice, and the shells exploded very wildly and not according to the distances regulated by the fuses.
The sheriff seized all his negro slaves, as they worked on his Nolichucky farm, and bore them for safe-keeping to Tipton's house, a rambling cluster of stout log buildings, on Sinking Creek of the Watanga. Sevier raised a hundred and fifty men and marched to take them back, carrying a light fieldpiece. Tipton's friends gathered, thirty or forty strong, and a siege began.
His hopes of a crown faded rapidly, and when the army reached Lisbon it had dwindled to not much more than four thousand effective men the rest being dead of dysentery, or on the sick-list from imprudence in eating and drinking while they found that they had made an unfortunate omission in their machinery for assailing the capital, having not a single fieldpiece in the whole army.
It was at this moment of confusion and terror that Waverley remarked an English officer, apparently of high rank, standing, alone and unsupported, by a fieldpiece, which, after the flight of the men by whom it was wrought, he had himself levelled and discharged against the clan of Mac-Ivor, the nearest group of Highlanders within his aim.
It certainly was, for immediately another flash sprang up, accompanied by the same deep bellow, as the fieldpiece was discharged. No doubt, while it may have been rather out of date in pattern, the cannon was good enough to have done savage execution, handled by expert German or French gunners.
For Holmes was bending a bit low, a hundred yards or so away, and stealing toward the fieldpiece that does duty as reveille gun. "It would be a shame to bet on what Greg's up to -it would be too easy!" muttered Prescott, standing behind a flowering bush at the road's edge.
Meanwhile, the fellow who was driving the mules attached to the fieldpiece, turned his head, and saw what was going on. In a trice he snatched up another rammer, and, without any warning, came crack over the fellow's cranium to whom we had been speaking, as hard as he could draw, making the instrument quiver again. "Dem you, ye, ye Jericho ah so you bash my brokefast eh?
Hasan Agha was, it seemed, a famous fighter; and the men did all they could to make him tell me of his battles. They brought an old man in out of the town to see me because he had fought in the Crimean war, and knew the English. Before it grew too hot, they took me out to see the barracks and a ramshackle old fieldpiece which they seemed to idolise.
Word Of The Day