rn looked forth
from amid the waste of the wilderness, and the glad music of human
voices awoke the silence of the forest.

'Now! God of mercy, behold the change! Under the shadow of a
pretext--under the sanctity of the name of God--invoking the Redeemer to
their aid, do these foreign hirelings slay our people! They throng our
towns; they darken our plains; and now they encompass our posts on the
lonely plain of Chadd's Ford.

"The effect was electric. The keen eye of the in-trepid Wayne flashed
fire. The neighboring sentinels, who had paused to listen, quickened
their pace, with a proud tread and a nervous feeling, impatient for
vengeance on the vandal foe.

"Gathering strength once more, he checked the choking sensations his own
recital had caused, and continued:

"'They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.'

"Brethren, think me not unworthy of belief, when I tell you that the
doom of the Britisher is near! Think me not vain, when I tell you that
beyond the cloud that now enshrouds us, I see gathering, thick and fast,
the darker cloud and the blacker storm of a Divine retribution!

'They may conquer us on the morrow! Might and wrong may prevail, and we
may be driven from this field--but the hour of God's own vengeance will
surely come!

'Ay, if in the vast solitudes of eternal space, if in the heart of the
boundless universe, there throbs the being of an awful God, quick
to avenge, and sure to punish guilt, then will the man, George of
Brunswick, called king, feel in his brain and in his heart the vengeance
of the Eternal Jehovah! A blight will be upon his life--a withered
brain, an accurst intellect; a blight will be upon his children, and on
his people. Great God! how dread the punishment!

'A crowded populace, peopling the dense towns where the man of money
thrives, while the labourer starves; want striding among the people
in all its forms of terror; an ignorant and God-defying priesthood
chuckling over the miseries of millions; a proud and merciless nobility
adding wrong to wrong, and heaping insult upon robbery and fraud;
royalty corrupt to the very heart; aristocracy rotten to the core; crime
and want linked hand in hand, and tempting men to deeds of woe and
death--these are a part of the doom and the retribution that shall come
upon the English throne and the English people!'

"This was pronounced with a voice of such power, that its tones might
have reached almost to the Briton's camp, an