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- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z
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- 7357
- text
- CHAPTER XXVII.
REQUIESCAT IN PACE.
It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock on
a Fourth of July; and half an hour after landing, hustled by the
riotous crowd near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run
over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered
banner, inscribed with gilt letters:
“BUNKER-HILL
1775.
GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT!”
It was on Copps’ Hill, within the city bounds, one of the enemy’s
positions during the fight, that our wanderer found his best repose
that day. Sitting down here on a mound in the graveyard, he looked off
across Charles River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient
monument, at that period, was hard to see, as a struggling sprig of
corn in a chilly spring. Upon those heights, fifty years before, his
now feeble hands had wielded both ends of the musket. There too he had
received that slit upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair with
the Serapis, being traversed by a cutlass wound, made him now the
bescarred bearer of a cross.
For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about him. The sultry July
day was waning. His son sought to cheer him a little ere rising to
return to the lodging for the present assigned them by the
ship-captain. “Nay,” replied the old man, “I shall get no fitter rest
than here by the mounds.”
But from this true “Potter’s Field,” the boy at length drew him away;
and encouraged next morning by a voluntary purse made up among the
reassembled passengers, father and son started by stage for the country
of the Housatonie. But the exile’s presence in these old mountain
townships proved less a return than a resurrection. At first, none knew
him, nor could recall having heard of him. Ere long it was found, that
more than thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his family
in that region, a bachelor, following the example of three-fourths of
his neighbors, had sold out and removed to a distant country in the
west; where exactly, none could say.
He sought to get a glimpse of his father’s homestead. But it had been
burnt down long ago. Accompanied by his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted,
he next went to find the site. But the roads had years before been
changed. The old road was now browsed over by sheep; the new one ran
straight through what had formerly been orchards. But new orchards,
planted from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes
near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel. At
length he came to a field waving with buckwheat. It seemed one of those
fields which himself had often reaped. But it turned out, upon inquiry,
that but three summers since a walnut grove had stood there. Then he
vaguely remembered that his father had sometimes talked of planting
such a grove, to defend the neighboring fields against the cold north
wind; yet where precisely that grove was to have been, his shattered
mind could not recall. But it seemed not unlikely that during his long
exile, the walnut grove had been planted and harvested, as well as the
annual crops preceding and succeeding it, on the very same soil.
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