Page 175 - The model orator, or, Young folks' speaker : containing the choicest recitations and readings from the best authors for schools, public entertainments, social gatherings, Sunday schools, etc. : including recitals in prose and verse ...

heard in the whole brigade, We know that wo are being driven foot
by foot, and that wher we break once more the line will go to pieces
and the enemy will pour through the gap.
Hero comes help !
Down tTne crowded highway gallops a battery, withdrawn frmn
some other position Lo save ours. The field fence is scattered wSide
you could comil thirty, and the Suns rush from the hills behind us,
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Six horses to a piece— three riders to each gun. Over dry ditches
where a farmer would iu>h drive a wagon, through clump? of bushes,
over logs a foot thick evcrv horse on the gallop, everv rider lashing
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hi.-i team and yelling— the sight behind us making us forget, the sight
in front The guns jump two feet h.hdt as the heavy wheels strike a
rock or log. but not a horse slackens his pace, not a cannoneer loses his
seat Six turns six caissons, six.tv horses, ehditv men. race for the
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brow of the lull as it he who should reach it first would be knighted,
A moment ago the battery was a confused mob. We look ago in,
and the six guns arc in position, the detached horses harrying away,
tin.: ammunition diesis open, and along our line runs the command:
"(live them one more volley and fail back to support the guns.1'
We ha', e searely obeyed when boom! boom! opens the ba'.tery, and
jets of Ihe jump down and scorch the green trees under which we
fought and despaired
The shattered old brigade has a chance to breathe for the first time
in three hours, as we form a line and lie down. What grim, cool
fellows those cannoneers are. Every man is a pci lect machine,
•Bullets splash dust in their faces, but they do not wince. Bullets sing
over and around ; they do not dodge. There goes one to the on:;b,
shot through the head as he sponged his gim. That machinery loses
just one beat, misses just one cog in the wheels and then works away
again as before.
it very gun is using short-fuse shell. The ground shakes and trem­
bles, the roar shuts out all sound from a line three miles long, and the
shells go shrinking into the swamp to cut trees short oil. to mow groat
gaps in the bushes, hunt out and shatter and mangle men until their