d nights. There
are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old boles of burned
trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs trembling in the
depths of the thickets.

Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, "to guard the chateau," and
concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there.
They tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this
frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of
their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It
was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught.
This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself.

After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into
it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they
were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble
voices were heard calling from the well.

This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded like
the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side is
open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has
a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell. This
little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The iron
supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over, the
eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up
mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed
in a growth of nettles.

This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty
and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either
pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which served
the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to time a
bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then flies
away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The
door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
pretty Gothic lock-pl