Some of these facts, it is true, rest on tradition, yet we are willing to believe them, as they impart a gleam of just and generous feeling to his closing scene.  He died on the night of the 13th, at the Great Meadows, the place of Washington’s discomfiture in the preceding year.  His obsequies were performed before break of day.  The chaplain having been wounded, Washington read the funeral service.  All was done in sadness, and without parade, so as not to attract the attention of lurking savages, who might discover and outrage his grave.  It is doubtful even whether a volley was fired over it, that last military honor which he had recently paid to the remains of an Indian warrior.  The place of his sepulture, however, is still known, and pointed out.

Reproach spared him not, even when in his grave.  The failure of the expedition was attributed both in England and America, to his obstinacy, his technical pedantry, and his military conceit.  He had been continually warned to be on his guard against ambush and surprise, but without avail.  Had he taken the advice urged on him by Washington and others, to employ scouting parties of Indians and rangers, he would never have been so signally surprised and defeated.

Still his dauntless conduct on the field of battle shows him to have been a man of fearless spirit; and he was universally allowed to be an accomplished disciplinarian.  His melancholy end, too, disarms censure of its asperity.  Whatever may have been his faults and errors, he in a manner expiated them by the hardest lot that can befall a brave soldier, ambitious of renown—­an unhonored grave in a strange land:  a memory clouded by misfortune, and a name for ever coupled with defeat.

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=_185._= BARON STEUBEN IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY.

The committee having made their report, the baron’s proffered services were accepted with a vote of thanks for his disinterestedness, and he was ordered to join the army of Valley Forge.  That army, in its ragged condition and squalid quarters, presented a sorry aspect to a strict disciplinarian from Germany, accustomed to the order and appointments of European camps; and the baron often declared, that under such circumstances no army in Europe could be kept together for a single month.  The liberal mind of Steuben, however, made every allowance; and Washington soon found in him a consummate soldier, free from pedantry or pretension.

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For a time, there was nothing but drills throughout the camp, then gradually came evolutions of every kind.  The officers were schooled as well as the men.  The troops, says a person who was present in the camp, were paraded in a single line with shouldered arms; every officer in his place.  The baron passed in front, then took the musket of each soldier in hand, to see whether it was clean and well polished, and examined whether the men’s accoutrements were in good order.