The Project Gutenberg EBook of Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle, by
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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Title: Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle
as She Saw it from the Belfry

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Illustrator: Howard Pyle

Release Date: June 26, 2007 [EBook #21941]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUNKER HILL ***

Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Janet Blenkinship and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Grandmother's Story

of

Bunker Hill Battle

_as She Saw it from the Belfry_

by

Oliver Wendell Holmes

_With Illustrations by_

Howard Pyle

_Boston and New York_
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
MCMXXV

COPYRIGHT, 1875, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

[Illustration]

* * * * *

_GRANDMOTHER'S STORY_

_of_

BUNKER HILL

_BATTLE_

'T is like stirring living embers when, at eighty, one remembers
All the achings and the quakings of "the times that tried men's souls;"
When I talk of _Whig_ and _Tory_, when I tell the _Rebel_ story,
To you the words are ashes, but to me they're burning coals.

I had heard the muskets' rattle of the April running battle;
Lord Percy's hunted soldiers, I can see their red coats still;
But a deadly chill comes o'er me, as the day looms up before me,
When a thousand men lay bleeding on the slopes of Bunker's Hill.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

'T was a peaceful summer's morning, when the first thing gave us warning
Was the booming of the cannon from the river and the shore:
"Child," says grandma, "what's the matter, what is all this noise and
clatter?
Have those scalping Indian devils come to murder us once more?"

Poor old soul! my sides were shaking in the midst of all my quaking,
To hear her talk of Indians when the guns began to roar:
She had seen the burning village, and the slaughter and the pillage,
When the