Two Hundred Regulars, On Arriving, Seized
The Bridge.
Here they received and returned the British fire and
were only overcome by numbers.
Major Buttrick forced them back
into the village.
As we gazed across again at the Old Manse we thought of the
wonderful essays that had been written here. In the rear of the
old house is a delightful study. It was here that Emerson wrote
"Nature." Here, too, Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse."
We thought of the brave clergyman who, from the north window,
commanding a broad view of the river, stood watching the first
conflict of a long and deadly struggle between the mother
country and her child.
Realizing the danger they were in, the British troops began
their retreat of eighteen miles. They had eaten little or
nothing for fourteen hours. Ages ago freedom loving Nature had
conspired to aid the Americans by shaping the field of battle.
Huge boulders had been left by the glacier, the potent rays of
the April sun made dense masses of verdure in willows, which
thus became an ally of the pine. Stone fences and haystacks
became ready-made fortifications, and every rising spot was
filled with irate hostile yeoman who harried them with aim true
and deadly. They soon began to run and leave their wounded
behind, and in place of a retreat their disorderly flight must
have had the appearance of a Marathon race, the rattle of
musketry acting or serving as signals for each to do his best on
the home stretch.
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