A Book of Golden Deeds by Charlotte M. Yonge (best books to read for women .TXT) 📖

it, Turenne is more concerned than we are. At this moment he is thinking how to deliver us. He watches for us while we sleep. He is our father. It is plain that you are but young.'

Another night, when he was going the round of the camp, he overheard some of the younger men murmuring at the discomforts of the march; when an old soldier, newly recovered from a severe wound, said: 'You do not know our father. He would not have made us go through such fatigue, unless he had some great end in view, which we cannot yet make out.' Turenne always declared that nothing had ever given him more pleasure than this conversation.

There was a severe sickness among the troops, and he went about among the sufferers, comforting them, and seeing that their wants were supplied. When he passed by, the soldiers came out of their tents to look at him, and say, 'Our father is in good health: we have nothing to fear.'

The army had to enter the principality of Halberstadt, the way to which lay over ridges of high hills with narrow defiles between them. Considerable time was required for the whole of the troops to march through a single narrow outlet; and one very cold day, when such a passage was taking place, the Marshal, quite spent with fatigue, sat down under a bush to wait till all had marched by, and fell asleep. When he awoke, it was snowing fast; but he found himself under a sort of tent made of soldiers' cloaks, hung up upon the branches of trees planted in the ground, and round it were standing, in the cold and snow, all unsheltered, a party of soldiers. Turenne called out to them, to ask what they were doing there. 'We are taking care of our father,' they said; 'that is our chief concern.' The general, to keep up discipline, seems to have scolded them a little for straggling from their regiment; but he was much affected and gratified by this sight of their hearty love for him.

Still greater and more devoted love was shown by some German soldiers in the terrible winter of 1812. It was when the Emperor Napoleon I. had made his vain attempt to conquer Russia, and had been prevented from spending the winter at Moscow by the great fire that consumed all the city. He was obliged to retreat through the snow, with the Russian army pursuing him, and his miserable troops suffering horrors beyond all imagination. Among them were many Italians, Poles, and Germans, whom he had obliged to become his allies; and the 'Golden Deed' of ten of these German soldiers, the last remnant of those led from Hesse Darmstadt by their gallant young Prince Emilius, is best told in Lord Houghton's verses:--

'From Hessen Darmstadt every step to Moskwa's blazing banks, Was Prince Emilius found in flight before the foremost ranks; And when upon the icy waste that host was backward cast, On Beresina's bloody bridge his banner waved the last.

'His valor shed victorious grace on all that dread retreat-- That path across the wildering snow, athwart the blinding sleet; And every follower of his sword could all endure and dare, Becoming warriors, strong in hope, or stronger in despair. 'Now, day and dark, along the storm the demon Cossacks sweep-- The hungriest must not look for food, the weariest must not sleep. No rest but death for horse or man, whichever first shall tire; They see the flames destroy, but ne'er may feel the saving fire. 'Thus never closed the bitter night, nor rose the salvage morn, But from the gallant company some noble part was shorn; And, sick at heart, the Prince resolved to keep his purposed way With steadfast forward looks, nor count the losses of the day.

'At length beside a black, burnt hut, an island of the snow, Each head in frigid torpor bent toward the saddle bow; They paused, and of that sturdy troop--that thousand banded men-- At one unmeditated glance he numbered only ten!

'Of all that high triumphant life that left his German home-- Of all those hearts that beat beloved, or looked for love to come-- This piteous remnant, hardly saved, his spirit overcame, While memory raised each friendly face, recalled an ancient name.

'These were his words, serene and firm, 'Dear brothers, it is best That here, with perfect trust in Heaven, we give our bodies rest; If we have borne, like faithful men, our part of toil and pain, Where'er we wake, for Christ's good sake, we shall not sleep in vain.'

'Some uttered, others looked assent--they had no heart to speak; Dumb hands were pressed, the pallid lip approached the callous cheek. They laid them side by side; and death to him at last did seem To come attired in mazy robe of variegated dream.

'Once more he floated on the breast of old familiar Rhine, His mother's and one other smile above him seemed to shine; A blessed dew of healing fell on every aching limb; Till the stream broadened, and the air thickened, and all was dim.

'Nature has bent to other laws if that tremendous night Passed o'er his frame, exposed and worn, and left no deadly blight; Then wonder not that when, refresh'd and warm, he woke at last, There lay a boundless gulf of thought between him and the past.

'Soon raising his astonished head, he found himself alone, Sheltered beneath a genial heap of vestments not his own; The light increased, the solemn truth revealing more and more, The soldiers' corses, self-despoiled, closed up the narrow door.

'That every hour, fulfilling good, miraculous succor came, And Prince Emilius lived to give this worthy deed to fame. O brave fidelity in death! O strength of loving will! These are the holy balsam drops that woeful wars distil.'


GUNPOWDER PERILS

1700


The wild history of Ireland contains many a frightful tale, but also many an action of the noblest order; and the short sketch given by Maria Edgeworth of her ancestry, presents such a chequerwork of the gold and the lead that it is almost impossible to separate them.

At the time of the great Irish rebellion of 1641 the head of the Edgeworth family had left his English wife and her infant son at his castle of Cranallagh in county Longford, thinking them safe there while he joined the royal forces under the Earl of Ormond. In his absence, however, the rebels attacked the castle at night, set fire to it, and dragged the lady out absolutely naked. She hid herself under a furze bush, and succeeded in escaping and reaching Dublin, whence she made her way to her father's house in Derbyshire. Her little son was found by the rebels lying in his cradle, and one of them actually seized the child by the leg and was about to dash out his brains against the wall; but a servant named Bryan Ferral, pretending to be even more ferocious, vowed that a sudden death was too good for the little heretic, and that he should be plunged up to the throat in a bog-hole and left for the crows to pick out his eyes. He actually did place the poor child in the bog , but only to save his life; he returned as soon as he could elude his comrades, put the boy into a pannier below eggs and chickens, and thus carried him straight though the rebel camp to his mother at Dublin. Strange to say, these rebels, who thought being dashed against the wall too good a fate for the infant, extinguished the flames of the castle out of reverence for the picture of his grandmother, who had been a Roman Catholic, and was painted on a panel with a cross on her bosom and a rosary in her hand.

John Edgeworth, the boy thus saved, married very young, and went with his wife to see London after the Restoration. To pay their expenses they mortgaged an estate and put the money in a stocking, which they kept on the top of the bed; and when that store was used up, the young man actually sold a house in Dublin to buy a high-crowned hat and feathers. Still, reckless and improvident as they were, there was sound principle within them, and though they were great favorites, and Charles II. insisted on knighting the husband, their glimpse of the real evils and temptations of his Court sufficed them, and in the full tide of flattery and admiration the lady begged to return home, nor did she ever go back to Court again.

Her home was at Castle Lissard, in full view of which was a hillock called Fairymount, or Firmont, from being supposed to be the haunt of fairies. Lights, noises, and singing at night, clearly discerned from the castle, caused much terror to Lady Edgeworth, though her descendants affirm that they were fairies of the same genus as those who beset Sir John Falstaff at Hearne's oak, and intended to frighten her into leaving the place. However, though her nerves might be disturbed, her spirit was not to be daunted; and, fairies or no fairies, she held her ground at Castle Lissard, and there showed what manner of woman she was in a veritable and most fearful peril.

On some alarm which caused the gentlemen of the family to take down their guns, she went to a dark loft at the top of the house to fetch some powder from a barrel that was there kept in store, taking a young maid-servant to carry the candle; which, as might be expected in an Irish household of the seventeenth century, was devoid of any candlestick. After taking the needful amount of gunpowder, Lady Edgeworth locked the door, and was halfway downstairs when she missed the candle, and asking the girl what she had done with it, received the cool answer that 'she had left it sticking in the barrel of black salt'. Lady Edgeworth bade her stand still, turned round, went back alone to the loft where the tallow candle stood guttering and flaring planted in the middle of the gunpowder, resolutely put an untrembling hand beneath it, took it out so steadily that no spark fell, carried it down, and when she came to the bottom of the stairs dropped on her knees, and broke forth in a thanksgiving aloud for the safety of the household in this frightful peril. This high-spirited lady lived to be ninety years old, and left a numerous family. One grandson was the Abbe Edgeworth, known in France as De Firmont, such being the alteration of Fairymount on French lips. It was he who, at the peril of his own life, attended Louis XVI. to the guillotine, and thus connected his name so closely with the royal cause that when his cousin Richard Lovell Edgeworth, of Edgeworths-town, visited France several years after, the presence of a person so called was deemed perilous to the rising power of Napoleon. This latter Mr. Edgeworth was the father of Maria, whose works we hope are well known to our young readers.

The good Chevalier Bayard was wont to mourn over the introduction of firearms, as destructive of chivalry; and certainly the steel-clad knight, with barbed steed, and sword and lance, has disappeared from the battle-field; but his most essential qualities, truth, honor, faithfulness, mercy, and self-devotion, have not disappeared with him, nor can they as long as Christian men and women bear in mind that 'greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend'.

And that terrible compound, gunpowder, has been the occasion of many another daring deed, requiring desperate resolution, to save others