I profess to be a man of peace.  Through training, environment, and calling I ought to be so, and yet there is a fibre in any make-up which has always throbbed strangely to the drum.  Is it perhaps a streak of heredity?  In almost every noteworthy war since the foundation of the country, men of my line have borne a part.  I count ancestors who stood among the minute-men at Concord bridge.  Another was in the redoubt at Bunker Hill.  In the earlier time two great-great-grandfathers went out against Montcalm and were good soldiers in the Old French War.  Still earlier a progenitor, whose name I bear, faced the Indian peril in King Philip’s War, and was among the slain in the gloomy Sudbury fight Perhaps it is a trace from these ancient forbears still lingering in my blood that will respond when the trumpets blow, however I strive to repress it, and it has given me qualms.

I was not easy in mind when I stood on the tower of St. Stephen’s Church, in Vienna more than forty years ago, to find that what I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schoenbrunn, not the Danube pouring grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little hamlets just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where Napoleon fought the battles of Aspern and Wagram.  Nor was I quite easy when I set out to climb the St. Gotthard Pass, to find that although the valley below Airolo was so green with fertile pasture, and from the glaciers above me the heavens were pricked so boldly by the splintered peaks, I was thinking most where it was precisely that old Suwarrow dug the grave and threatened to bury himself, when his army refused to follow him; then how he must have looked when he had subdued them, riding forward in his sheepskin, or whatever rude Russian dress he wore, this uncouth hero who needed no scratching to be proved Tartar, while his loving host pressed after him into every death-yielding terror that man or nature could throw across his path.

That I had good reason for my uneasiness, on second thoughts, I do not believe.  Nor do I believe it is just for you, high-toned friend, to censure me as somewhat low and brutal, when I confess that of all one can see in Europe, nothing thrilled me quite so much as the great historic battle-fields.  Nothing deserves so to interest man as man himself; and what spots, after all, are so closely and nobly connected with man as the spots where he has fought?  That we are what we are, indeed that we are at all,—­that any race is what it is or is at all,—­was settled on certain great fields of decision to which we as well as every race can point back.  And then nothing absorbs us like a spectacle of pain and pathos!  Tragedy enchants, while it shocks.  The field of battle is tragedy the most shocking; is it doing indignity to our puzzling nature to say it is tragedy most absorbing?  And there is another