“Retreat!  Major Willoughby!”

“I called it retreat, sure enough; but it was only a march in, again, after having done the business on which we went out.  I shall admit, I say, sir, that we were hard pressed, until reinforced.”

“Reinforced, my dear Bob! Your regiment, our regiment could not need a reinforcement against all the Yankees in New England.”

The major could not abstain from laughing, a little, at this exhibition of his father’s esprit de corps; but native frankness, and love of truth, compelled him to admit the contrary.

“It did, sir, notwithstanding,” he answered; “and, not to mince the matter, it needed it confoundedly.  Some of our officers who have seen the hardest service of the last war, declare, that taking the march, and the popping work, and the distance, altogether, it was the warmest day they remember.  Our loss, too, was by no means insignificant, as I hope you will believe, when you know the troops engaged.  We report something like three hundred casualties.”

The captain did not answer for quite a minute.  All this time he sat thoughtful, and even pale; for his mind was teeming with the pregnant consequences of such an outbreak.  Then he desired his son to give a succinct, but connected history of the whole affair.  The major complied, beginning his narrative with an account of the general state of the country, and concluding it, by giving, as far as it was possible for one whose professional pride and political feelings were too deeply involved to be entirely impartial, a reasonably just account of the particular occurrence already mentioned.

The events that led to, and the hot skirmish which it is the practice of the country to call the Battle of Lexington, and the incidents of the day itself, are too familiar to the ordinary reader, to require repetition here.  The major explained all the military points very clearly, did full justice to the perseverance and daring of the provincials, as he called his enemies—­for, an American himself, he would not term them Americans—­and threw in as many explanatory remarks as he could think of, by way of vindicating the “march in, again.”  This he did, too, quite as much out of filial piety, as out of self-love; for, to own the truth, the captain’s mortification, as a soldier, was so very evident as to give his son sensible pain.

“The effect of all this,” continued the major, when his narrative of the military movements was ended, “has been to raise a tremendous feeling, throughout the country, and God knows what is to follow.”

“And this you have come hither to tell me, Robert,” said the father, kindly.  “It is well done, and as I would have expected from you.  We might have passed the summer, here, and not have heard a whisper of so important an event.”