Page:American History Told by Contemporaries, v2.djvu/605

No. 200] moving to fall into your rear, and intercept your retreat. Retire instantly — don t lose a moment, or you will be cut off." The gallant man obeyed reluctantly, and withdrew the guard in fine style, slowly but safely.

As I rode back to the main body on Butts Hill, I fell in with a party of soldiers bearing a wounded officer on a litter, whom I found to be my friend, H. Sherburne, brother of Mrs. John Langdon of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a fellow volunteer. They were carrying him to the surgeons in the rear, to have his leg amputated. He had just been wounded by a random ball while sitting at breakfast. This was a source of lasting mortification, as he told me afterwards, — "If this had happened to me in the field, in active duty, the loss of a leg might be borne, but to be condemned through all future life to say I lost my leg under the breakfast table, is too bad." Mr. Rufus King was acting that day as a volunteer aid-du-camp to General Glover, whose quarters were in a house at the foot and east of Quaker Hill, distant from the contested position of the rear-guard a long mile. The general and the officers who composed his family were seated at breakfast, their horses standing saddled at the door. The firing on the height of the hill became heavy and incessant, when the general directed Mr. King to mount and see what and where the firing was. He quitted the table, poor Sherburne took his chair, and was hardly seated, when a spent cannon ball from the scene of action bounded in at the open window, fell upon the floor, rolled to its destination, the ancle of Sherburne, and crushed all the bones of his foot. Surely there is a providence which controls the events of human life, and which withdrew Mr. King from this misfortune.

Soon after this, as I was carrying an important order, the wind, which had risen with the sun, blew off my hat. It was not a time to dismount for a hat. I therefore tied a white handkerchief round my head, and as I did not recover my hat until evening, I formed, the rest of the day, the most conspicuous mark that ever was seen on the field — mounted on a superb bay horse, in a summer dress of nankeen — with this headdress, duty led me to every point where danger was to be found, and I escaped without the slightest injury. It becomes me to say with the Psalmist, "I thank thee, Oh thou Most High, for thou hast covered my head in the day of battle !" For never was aid-du-camp exposed to more danger than I was during that entire day, from daylight to dusk.

The day was passed in skirmishing, and towards evening a body of