e city of Washington, the capital of the young republic.

Their coming was a surprise. There were few trained soldiers to meet
this army, and those were not the days of railroads, so that no troops
could be brought in haste from afar. Those that gathered were nearly all
raw militia, and they did not stand long before the British veterans who
had fought in the wars with Napoleon. They were soon put to flight, and
the British army marched into our capital city.

There they behaved in a way that their country has ever since been
ashamed of. They set fire to the public buildings and burned most of
them to the ground. The Capitol, the President's house, and other
buildings were burned, and the records of the government were destroyed.
Then, having acted like so many savages, the British hurried away before
the Americans could get at them for revenge. That was a victory, I
fancy, which the British do not like to read about.

They had been so successful at Washington that they thought they would
try the same thing with another city. This time they picked out New
Orleans, which was so far away from the thickly settled part of the
country that they fancied it would be an easy matter to capture it. In
this they made a great mistake, as you will soon see.

There was a general in the South who was not used to being defeated.
This was Andrew Jackson, one of our bravest soldiers, who had just won
fame in a war with the Indians of Georgia. He was a man who was always
ready to fight and this the English found when they marched on New
Orleans. There were twelve thousand of them, and Jackson, who had been
sent there to meet them, only had half that many. And the British were
trained soldiers, while the Americans were militia. But most of them
were men of the backwoods, who knew how to shoot.

[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS.]

Some of you may have heard that Jackson's men fought behind cotton
bales. That is not quite true, but he was in such a hurry in building
his breastworks that he did put in them some bales of cotton taken from
the warehouses. The British, who were in as great a hurry, built a
breastwork of sugar hogsheads which they found on the plantations. But
the cannon balls soon set the cotton on fire and filled the air with
flying sugar, so the bales and the hogsheads had to be pulled out. It
was found that cotton and sugar, while good enough in their place, were
not good things to stop cannon balls.

Soon the