was loth to see him trampled on in our advance, as he cried, My poor wife! my child!' and died. But what was worse than all, Gunner, was the loss of our General. He was shot through the body by the riflemen who fired from the wood, before the battle began. "He was as mild as a lamb, but as brave as a lion, Wad: he was beloved by soger and sailor. Poor soul! he, too, thought of his wife with his last breath. "The next day we got within a few miles of the town of Baltimore, but such a night came on as I have seldom seen; rain, wind, lightning, and thunder, were wrangling aloft which should be masters. We were crouched under the lee of some trees, and it was only between the rolls of the thunder and the flashes of the lightning, that we saw the sparkling of the fusee, and heard the bursts of the shells, as they were thrown from the ships towards the town. "Here we were waiting with stripes of white linen round our hats and arms; and, as they knew there would be no stopping Tom Smith and others having a crack when they saw a Yankee, the flints were taken out of our muskets, with orders to march direct to the charge against the lines when the signal should be given. : "But a council of war was held, and no signal was given the next day we retreated, and passed over the field of battle again, where the dead bodies were laying stiff and ghastly, drenched with rain and gore; and then returned on board our ships, as we had come on shore, by the boats; short, however, of some of our shipmates, many blankets, haversacks, and canteens, and lots of powder and ball, with the glory of having thrashed Jonathan in his own woods." CHAPTER IX. "Ten tousand men came overe, But vat vas dat to Shackson, O! Shackson is de boy !" THIS motto is a faint recollection of an imitating, inimitable singing to the air of Malbrook; words supposed to be sounded by a French Yankee,' at a dinner given to the gallant General Jackson, who so bravely defended the city of New Orleans against the English, in 1814, and may serve as a kind of prelude to this part of the Boatswain's story. "But now comes that infernal affair, New Orleans, Gunner: a more horrid business was never gone through by man or beast. 66 May be you don't know Lake Borgne? and yet it is no lake, for it opens out into the Gulf of Mexico. It is a very shoal navigation; so that we had often seventy miles to go in open boats, loaded with sogers; and buckled and belted as they were with knapsacks, there was no swimming for it when the boats were upset or sunk, and many a poor trooper lies at the bottom there. “The shores are low, swampy, and covered with reeds; and for the climate, I never thought there was such a place under heaven. A place where you have summer and winter in twenty-four hours. In the daytime, we were scorched; in the night, we were frozen. Who would have thought of ice about the boats' bows in a place so near the West Indies, Gunner? "The black regiments had no more notion of Jack frost, than bite 'im no see 'im.' They died like rotten sheep. "Many a weary pull and sail I've had up and down that infernal hole, which I wish I may never see again. It is fit for nothing but snakes, alligators, and Yankees-begging the Jonathans' pardons for knotting them together; but stinctions are, some how or other, levelled in war-time, and specially when a man has been bitten, as I have, by both; and, moreover, a little blind from being half-melted and frozen over and over again. "Our first work was to clear the lake of a squad of gun-boats; and they were accordinglye bevelled in a trice by the boats of the fleet, though many a man went to Davy's locker in the job. The Nathans played their part like men; but it was all up with them when the boats got alongside; and, slashing muskets, |