Page:Tales of my landlord (Volume 3).djvu/46

 motionless, as the grey stones that lay scattered on the heath around them.

The total number of the insurgents might amount to about a thousand men; but of these there were scarce a hundred cavalry, nor were the one half of them even tolerably armed. The strength of their position, however, the sense of their having taken a desperate step, the superiority of their numbers, but, above all, the ardour of their enthusiasm, were the means on which their leaders reckoned for supplying the want of arms, equipage, and military discipline.

On the side of the hill which rose above the array of battle which they had adopted, were seen the women, and even the children, whom zeal, opposed to persecucutionpersecution [sic], had driven into the wilderness. They seemed stationed there to be spectators of the engagement by which their own fate, as well as that of their parents, husbands, and sons, was to be decided. Like the females of the ancient German tribes, the shrill cries which they raised,