thro' a deep hollow, and it was not
possible to look down without shuddering at the idea of the horses and
carriages and men which had been overturned one upon another; in some
parts the trees are _a la_ Ralph Leycester, and you see the dark black
of shade of the distant wood through them; but in other parts it is so
choked with brushwood and inequalities of ground, that you could not see
two yards before you, and no gorge was ever so good a cover for foxes as
this for all evil-disposed persons. At Waterloo we stopped to see the
Church, or rather the monuments in it, put up by the different regiments
over their fallen officers. They are all badly designed and executed but
one Latin one--not half so good as the epitaph on Lord Anglesey's leg
which the man had buried with the utmost veneration in his garden and
planted a tree over it; and he shows as a relic almost as precious as a
Catholic bit of bone or blood, the blood upon a chair in the room when
the leg was cut off, which he had promised my lord "_de ne jamais
effacer_".

At Mont St. Jean Donald began to know where he was. Here he found the
well where he had got some water for his horse; here the green pond he
had fixed upon as the last resource for his troop; here the cottage
where he had slept on the 17th; here the breach he had made in the hedge
for his horses to get into the field to bivouac; here the spot where he
had fired the first gun; here the hole in which he sat for the surgeon
to dress his wound. He had never been on the field since the day of the
battle, and his interest in seeing it again and discovering every spot
under its altered circumstances was fully as great as ours.

After all that John Scott[109] or Walter Scott or anybody can describe
or even draw, how much more clear and satisfactory is the conception
which one single glance over the reality gives you in an instant, than
any you can form from the best and most elaborate description that can
be given! To see it in perfection would be to have an officer of every
regiment to give you an account just of everything he saw and did on the
particular spot where he was stationed.

Donald scarcely knew as much as Edward did or as the people about of
what passed anywhere but just at his own station. But at every place it
was sufficient to ask the inhabitants where they were and what they
saw, to obtain interesting information.

[Illustration: Hougoumont ... June 18th

_To face p. 263._]

Every p