as
_cicerone_. The localities appeared like a book to him: he told where
the French lay _perdu_; pointed out the cover from whence the British
advanced, to be repulsed headlong; where they, according to his legend,
were re-formed, and once more thrust forward, to be again, and finally,
overthrown.

I understood the minutest details of the whole affair, as well as the
positions occupied by French, English, Indians, and Virginians, before
my good-natured guide appeared quite satisfied; at least, I was forced,
out of consideration for my own time and his patience, to say so much,
and with many thanks to leave him: not, however, until he had urged me
strongly to come home and take tea with his wife, or at least take a
drink with him; one or both of which I pledged myself to do on a future
occasion.

It was not a little amusing, at this distant day, to observe the ardour
with which my guide canvassed the lost fight, of which he had read, as
he informed me, twenty different accounts.

"It was a shame," he said, "a right-down sin, and a throwin' away of
men's lives, ever to have put them under Bradock's command," whom he
accused of having "no more military gumption than a goose."--"Why," he
said, "two companies of British grenadiers would have eat every
_crapaud_ on the ground, if they'd bin let to go round and in at one end
o' the ditch, instead of walking right straight up hill agin' the loaded
muzzles of guns they couldn't see, only by the smoke out o' the long
grass."

Then he would take off his hat, wipe his brow, and fairly knock it
against his knee with vexation at the British defeat.

"Why, sir," he said, at the same time grasping my thigh, where I sat in
my saddle, with an energy that brought tears into my eyes,--"why,
mister, just do you look up at that little knoll to the right; the place
warn't cleared then, and there was a heap o' dead timber lying
there-bout. Well, sir, Washington sent, out of his own head,--for he
warn't a deal thought on then, you see,--a company of Virginians to try
the trees for it. Well, now just look where they were fixed by that
move, right over the _crapauds_,--every mother's son o' them Virginians
good for a squirrel at fifty yards. I'm d----d if they wouldn't have
used up every human of a Frenchman behind the drain, if it had been left
to a settlement between them, and if the English would only quietly ha'
looked on, and kept Johnny from breaking cover and treeing it."

"And wh