With other detachments from various quarters, Israel’s regiment remained encamped for several days in the vicinity of Charlestown.  On the seventeenth of June, one thousand Americans, including the regiment of Patterson, were set about fortifying Bunker’s Hill.  Working all through the night, by dawn of the following day, the redoubt was thrown up.  But every one knows all about the battle.  Suffice it, that Israel was one of those marksmen whom Putnam harangued as touching the enemy’s eyes.  Forbearing as he was with his oppressive father and unfaithful love, and mild as he was on the farm, Israel was not the same at Bunker Hill.  Putnam had enjoined the men to aim at the officers; so Israel aimed between the golden epaulettes, as, in the wilderness, he had aimed between the branching antlers.  With dogged disdain of their foes, the English grenadiers marched up the hill with sullen slowness; thus furnishing still surer aims to the muskets which bristled on the redoubt.  Modest Israel was used to aver, that considering his practice in the woods, he could hardly be regarded as an inexperienced marksman; hinting, that every shot which the epauletted grenadiers received from his rifle, would, upon a different occasion, have procured him a deerskin.  And like stricken deers the English, rashly brave as they were, fled from the opening fire.  But the marksman’s ammunition was expended; a hand-to-hand encounter ensued.  Not one American musket in twenty had a bayonet to it.  So, wielding the stock right and left, the terrible farmers, with hats and coats off, fought their way among the furred grenadiers, knocking them right and left, as seal-hunters on the beach knock down with their clubs the Shetland seal.  In the dense crowd and confusion, while Israel’s musket got interlocked, he saw a blade horizontally menacing his feet from the ground.  Thinking some fallen enemy sought to strike him at the last gasp, dropping his hold on his musket, he wrenched at the steel, but found that though a brave hand held it, that hand was powerless for ever.  It was some British officer’s laced sword-arm, cut from the trunk in the act of fighting, refusing to yield up its blade to the last.  At that moment another sword was aimed at Israel’s head by a living officer.  In an instant the blow was parried by kindred steel, and the assailant fell by a brother’s weapon, wielded by alien hands.  But Israel did not come off unscathed.  A cut on the right arm near the elbow, received in parrying the officer’s blow, a long slit across the chest, a musket ball buried in his hip, and another mangling him near the ankle of the same leg, were the tokens of intrepidity which our Sicinius Dentatus carried from this memorable field.  Nevertheless, with his comrades he succeeded in reaching Prospect Hill, and from thence was conveyed to the hospital at Cambridge.  The bullet was extracted, his lesser wounds were dressed, and after much suffering from the fracture of the bone near the ankle, several pieces of which were extracted by the surgeon, ere long, thanks to the high health and pure blood of the farmer, Israel rejoined his regiment when they were throwing up intrenchments on Prospect Hill.  Bunker Hill was now in possession of the foe, who in turn had fortified it.