The scene changes.  Far away on the distant pathway of the ocean two ships approach each other, with white canvas broadly spread to receive the flying gales.  They are proudly built.  All of human art has been lavished in their graceful proportions, and in their well compacted sides, while they look in their dimensions like floating happy islands on the sea.  A numerous crew, with costly appliances of comfort, hives in their secure shelter.  Surely these two travelers shall meet in joy and friendship; the flag at the masthead shall give the signal of friendship; the happy sailors shall cluster in the rigging, and even on the yardarms, to look each other in the face, while the exhilarating voices of both crews shall mingle in accents of gladness uncontrollable.  It is not so.  Not as brothers, not as friends, not as wayfarers of the common ocean, do they come together; but as enemies.

The gentle vessels now bristle fiercely with death-dealing instruments.  On their spacious decks, aloft on all their masts, flashes the deadly musketry.  From their sides spout cataracts of flame, amidst the pealing thunders of a fatal artillery.  They, who had escaped “the dreadful touch of merchant-marring rocks”—­who had sped on their long and solitary way unharmed by wind or wave—­whom the hurricane had spared—­in whose favor storms and seas had intermitted their immitigable war—­now at last fall by the hand of each other.  The same spectacle of horror greets us from both ships.  On their decks, reddened with blood, the murderers of St. Bartholomew and of the Sicilian Vespers, with the fires of Smithfield, seem to break forth anew, and to concentrate their rage.  Each has now become a swimming Golgotha.  At length, these vessels—­such pageants of the sea—­once so stately—­so proudly built—­but now rudely shattered by cannon balls—­with shivered mast’s and ragged sails—­exist only as unmanageable wrecks, weltering on the uncertain waves, whose temporary lull of peace is now their only safety.  In amazement at this strange, unnatural contest—­away from country and home—­where there is no country or home to defend—­we ask again, wherefore this dismal duel?  Again the melancholy but truthful answer promptly comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations.

Notes.—­Austerlitz, a small town in Austria, seventy miles north from Vienna.  It is noted as the site of a battle, in December, 1805, between the allied Austrian and Russian armies, and the French under Napoleon.  The latter were victorious.  Buena Vista, a small hamlet in eastern Mexico, where, in 1847, five thousand Americans, under Gen. Taylor, defeated twenty thousand Mexicans, under Gen. Santa Anna.

Dreadful touch.—­Quoted from Merchant of Venice, Act iii, Scene ii.

St. Bartholomew.—­A terrible massacre took place in France, on St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24, 1572.  It has been estimated that twenty thousand persons perished.