e survivors retired, however, only to join a fresh attack
which was rallied and led by Pakenham himself.

He died with his men, but once more British pluck attempted the
impossible, and the Highland brigade was chosen to lead this forlorn
hope. That night the pipers wailed _Lochaber no more_ for the mangled
dead of the MacGregors, the MacLeans, and the MacDonalds who lay in
windrows with their faces to the foe. This was no Bladensburg holiday,
and the despised Americans were paying off many an old score. Two
thousand of the flower of Britain's armies were killed or wounded in the
few minutes during which the two assaults were so rashly attempted in
parade formation. Coolly, as though at a prize turkey shoot on a tavern
green, the American riflemen fired into these masses of doomed men, and
every bullet found its billet.

On the right of the line a gallant British onslaught led by Colonel
Rennie swept over a redoubt and the American defenders died to a man.
But the British wave was halted and rolled back by a tempest of bullets
from the line beyond, and the broken remnant joined the general retreat
which was sounded by the British trumpeters. An armistice was granted
next day and in shallow trenches the dead were buried, row on row, while
the muffled drums rolled in honor of three generals, seven colonels,
and seventy-five other officers who had died with their men. Behind the
log walls and earthworks loafed the unkempt, hilarious heroes of whom
only seventy-one had been killed or hurt, and no more than thirteen of
these in the grand assault which Pakenham had led. "Old Hickory" had
told them that they could lick their weight in wildcats, and they were
ready to agree with him.

Magnificent but useless, after all, excepting as a proud heritage for
later generations and a vindication of American valor against odds, was
this battle of New Orleans which was fought while the Salem ship,
_Astrea_, Captain John Derby, was driving home to the westward with the
news that a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent. With a sense of
mutual relief the United States and England had concluded a war in which
neither nation had definitely achieved its aims. The treaty failed to
mention such vital issues as the impressment of seamen and the injury to
commerce by means of paper blockades, while on the other hand England
relinquished its conquest of the Maine coast and its claim to military
domination of the Great Lakes. English statesmen