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That the retreating Americans were not annihilated was due to the rail-fence of General Putnam, and to his skill in holding the enemy in check while the flying fugitives found safety in the country. The battle of Bunker Hill is ended. The cross of St. George flies over Prescott's redoubt. Four hundred and fifty patriots and fifteen hundred Britons are killed, wounded, and missing.
Only a few stumps of inferior thickness give evidence, that some little labour has been performed by the axe. Even thus the clearing is a mere patch scarcely two acres in extent and the rude rail-fence, that zig-zags around it, attests that the owner is satisfied with the dimensions of his agricultural domain.
Then on reaching the rail-fence they turned abruptly to the right, were lost for an instant in the intervening thicket, and the next moment Cressy appeared alone, crossing the meadow in a shorter cut towards the house, having either scaled the fence or slipped through some familiar gap. Her companion had disappeared. Whether they had noticed that they were observed he could not determine.
The last week in October the opposing forces came in collision at Chatterton Hill, where was fought the so-called Battle of White Plains, at which, wrote Rufus Putnam, who had planned the defensive works, "the wall and stone fence behind which our troops were posted proved as fatal to the British as the rail-fence with grass hung on it did at Charlestown, June 17, 1775."
Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearest rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate old cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along the gray of the serpentine turnpike, a cart, with the driver lashing a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and is lost in the forest. Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the horizon.
Sometimes the trees met across it; sometimes it was bordered on one side by an old rail-fence of moss-grown cedar, with bushes sprouting beneath it, and thrusting their branches through it; sometimes by a stone-wall of unknown antiquity, older than the wood it closed in.
About them in the forest's edge, standing in groups under the trees, were the shadowy forms of saddle horses and mules, tied by their bridle reins to the lower branches; and nearer to the cabin, two or three teams, tied to the rail-fence, stood hitched to big wagons in which were splint-bottom chairs for extra seats.
Past the edge of the woods, ran a little stream with banks that were green to the very water's edge, and Chad followed it on through the woods, over a worn rail-fence, along a sprouting wheat-field, out into a pasture in which sheep and cattle were grazing, and on, past a little hill, where, on the next low slope, sat a great white house with big white pillars, and Chad climbed on top of the stone fence and sat, looking.
Cottontail darted off into the woods again to seek out his mate and inform her that their guilt had been discovered. Finally, Samuel came to the break in the woodland, an open field of rye, green as springtime grass, and his own exquisitely neat abode beckoning across the gray rail-fence to him. How pretty Blossy's geraniums looked in the sitting-room windows!
Slept like a dormouse; dreamed of dogs, dykes, and red-foxes, until I was awakened by my horse backing at a Virginia rail-fence, and giving me a nearer prospect of his ears than was consistent with the true principles of equation found Sam shaking me by the shoulder, with warning that it was time to rise. 29th. Took a cup of coffee, and mounted the nag Mr.
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