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Updated: July 11, 2025
The beaten emperor? or the mighty Napoleon, dying like an untended watch-fire on St. Helena? Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but they are mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which the thrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures, save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunrise and sunset.
The watch-fire had burned nearly away, and its flames no longer illuminated the scene.
So Ethelnoth and I and twenty young thanes went in the evening to Othery island, and there found a fenman to guide us, and so went to the foot of Edington hill just as darkness fell. The watch-fire lights, that were our guide, twinkled above us through the trees that were on the hillside; and we made at once for them, sending on the fenman to spy out the post before we were near it.
It made Ram Lal, the gray and colourless, look like a silver statue, and it made the smouldering flame of the watch-fire utterly dim and faint. It was a wonderful moon. I looked at my watch; it was eight o'clock. "Yes," said Isaacs, "you were tired and have slept long. It is time to be off. There is some whiskey in that flask.
Already it had come to mean home. They traveled about fifty miles southward, to the end of the island, making desultory trips up into the mountains to see if anywhere, on land or sea, there was a friendly wreath of smoke, and every night their watch-fire glowed from the highest peak in their vicinity. The island narrowed to a single range, detached peaks rising here and there from the sea.
With pardonable exaggeration the Emperor afterwards wrote to Clarke: "If I had then had 30,000 rounds, I should to-day be the master of the world." At nightfall, the chief returned weary and depressed to the windmill, and instructed Berthier to order the retreat. Then, beside a watch-fire, he sank down on a bench into a deep slumber, while his generals looked on in mournful silence.
We had scarcely sat down to tea round our watch-fire when curious shrieks and shouts most unearthly sounds reached our ears. They came from the direction where we had last seen the natives.
When Harold's party had first charged up the hill, the young lieutenant with whom he had conversed beside the watch-fire on the previous evening, was at the head of his platoon, and as the two bodies met, he sent the last shot from his revolver full in the faces of the foremost rank.
Major Brown heard the proposal in silence, and at last determined upon consulting his brother officers. "I have outstaid my time," said O'Flaherty, "but stop; the lives of so many are at stake, I consent." Saying which, they walked on without speaking, till they arrived where the others were standing around the watch-fire.
Having collected as much of these materials as she deemed sufficient for the purpose, Catharine next gathered up dry oak branches, plenty of which lay scattered here and there, to make a watch-fire for the night, and this done, weary and warm, she sat down on a little hillock, beneath the cooling shade of a grove of young aspens, that grew near the hut; pleased with the dancing of the leaves, which fluttered above her head, and fanned her warm cheek with their incessant motion, she thought, like her cousin Louise, that the aspen was the merriest tree in the forest, for it was always dancing, dancing, dancing, even when all the rest were still.
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