THE WISCONSIN FARMER.



            FhELD OF WATxRLOO.
  It is morning, and with a good French guide,
(I always prefer to hear the French side ol
the story,) I stand on Mont Lion, surveying
the field of Waterloo I I can hardly realize
that forty-seven years ago this very month-
quite within the memory of my guide-on
this very plain was fought the greatest and
most decisive battle in all history. The ies
of nodding wheat heads, fattened upon the
bones of heroes who that day perished, and
the waving meadows grown more luxuriant
for the mingled blood of Britton, Frank and
German, know it not; but there is old, dilap-
idated, war-scarred Hougomont, within whose
orchard wall whole regiments were literally
slashed to pieces in awful hand-to-hand con-
flicts-there, in the distance, are Genappe,
and Nivelles and La Haie Sainte, and last of
all La Belle Alliance where Napoleon stood
for hours and directed the battle-there, too,
where the Iron Duke stood nearly all day
amid the storm of shot and shell-there the
fatal sunken road from Ohaine to Braine
I'Alleud, into whose deep cut, as into the jaws
of hell, rode so many of Bonaparte's glorious
twenty-six squadrons of cuirassiers, in the
grandest charge of mounted men the world
ever saw-there the very spot whence, in his
enthusiasm, the Emperor sent his courier to
Paris to announce the victory-there the road
by which Blucher came with his Prussian host
and turned the scale, at the moment when the
allied armies were half in rout and Welling-
ton himself had well nigh lost all hope-there,
again, the road by which the deaf and treach-
erous Grouchy did not come to the aid of the
French-here where the grand Imperial Guard
performed those prodigies of valor which have
made them immortal-and there, in that little
valley, where, after the Imperial Army had
been thoroughly put to rout, and in the dark-
ness of the night, the lone legion of Cham-
bronne, under the concentrated fire of the
victorious artillery of the enemy, under a
storm of lead and iron such as granite could
not withstand, and under the crushing weight
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fought until, piece-meal, they were out and
blown to atoms or ground Into the very earth I
  Sixty thousand warriors of the 140,000 who
composed the two armies dead on the field I
That was a battle. God forbid that the pro-
gress of man may ever require such another I
And yet do I know that a second Waterloo in
not this moment l1ing fought in my own dear
native land? If so, may Destiny, as here, be
on the side of Liberty.
  - At Brussels again, and off for Ostend;
passing through the fine old manufacturing
town of Ghent and the low, rich lands of
northern Belgium.
  Ostend is a fortified port of considerable
magnitude and commercial business. Build-
ings and streets generally rather inferior,
and uninteresting.
  - My feet have left the continent. Tucked
away in a mean little steamer-they run none
other than such across the British Channel,
for some reason-I have five hours of horrible
sea-sickness, and at last, pale, faint, and
pretty much disgusted, stagger upon the
shore of the glorious little "sea-girt Isle" and
rest from my torture beneath the towering
chalk cliffs of Dover.
  -It is nine o'clock in the evening of the
6th of June; the train slowly enters a vast,
weltering city, whose million lights seem to
welcome me home again to this, the present
great centre of the world. The solid rock of
London Bridge is pressed by my weary feet
once more, and the sublime dome of St. Paul's
guides me on my way to the hospitable man-
sion of the upright Judge whose guest I am
glad, again, to become.
  It seems a life time since I was here before.
And what wonder,? Have I not made the
tour of the South of Europe-of France, of
Switzerland, of Germany, of Rhennish Prus-
sia avd of Belgium? Up the Seine, down the
Saone, up the Rhone, across the Alps on foot,
and down the RhineI A grand circuit of
some two thousand miles, stopping at every
place of either natural or historic interest,
and all within less than one month I My
Enlish fr.iend tall mA T nnoht to ha fprou -.



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