y and others,--by
all, in fact, who, escaping captivity, were in condition to fly. The
progress of Cornwallis and Tarleton left mere distinction, unsupported
by men, with few places of security. Marion, meanwhile, incapable of
present flight, was compelled to take refuge in the swamp and forest.
He was too conspicuous a person, had made too great a figure in previous
campaigns, and his military talents were too well known and too highly
esteemed, not to render him an object of some anxiety as well to friends
as foes. Still suffering from the hurts received in Charleston, with
bloody and malignant enemies all around him, his safety depended on his
secrecy and obscurity alone. Fortunately he had "won golden opinions
from all sorts of people." He had friends among all classes, who did
not permit themselves to sleep while he was in danger. Their activity
supplied the loss of his own. They watched while he slept. They assisted
his feebleness. In the moment of alarm, he was sped from house to house,
from tree to thicket, from the thicket to the swamp. His "hair-breadth
'scapes" under these frequent exigencies, were, no doubt, among the most
interesting adventures of his life, furnishing rare material, could they
be procured, for the poet and romancer. Unhappily, while the chronicles
show the frequent emergency which attended his painful condition, they
furnish nothing more. We are without details. The melancholy baldness
and coldness with which they narrate events upon which one would like to
linger is absolutely humbling to the imagination; which, kindled by the
simple historical outline, looks in vain for the satisfaction of
those doubts and inquiries, those hopes and fears, which the provoking
narrative inspires only to defraud. How would some old inquisitive
Froissart have dragged by frequent inquiry from contemporaneous
lips, the particular fact, the whole adventure, step by step, item by
item,--the close pursuit, the narrow escape,--and all the long train of
little, but efficient circumstances, by which the story would have been
made unique, with all its rich and numerous details! These, the reader
must supply from his own resources of imagination. He must conjecture
for himself the casual warning brought to the silent thicket, by the
devoted friend, the constant woman, or the humble slave; the midnight
bay of the watch dog or the whistle of the scout; or the sudden shot,
from friend or foe, by which the fugitive is couns