red at him, Butler, after making some steps on his
way back, turned to see if the fire had taken, and not being
satisfied, returned to the barn and set it in a blaze. As the
conflagration grew, the enemy was seen retreating from the rear of the
building, which they had entered at one end, as the flame ascended in
the other. Soon after reaching the pickets in safety, amid the shouts
of his friends, he was struck by a ball in his breast. Believing from
the pain he felt that it had penetrated his chest, turning to Adjutant
(now Gen.) McCalla, one of his Lexington comrades, and pressing his
hand to the spot, he said, "I fear this shot is mortal, but while I am
able to move, I will do my duty." To the anxious inquiries of this
friend, who met him soon afterward, he opened his vest, with a smile,
and showed him that the ball had spent itself on the thick wadding of
his coat and on his breast bone. He suffered, however, for many
weeks.

The little band within the pickets, which Winchester had surrendered,
after being carried himself a prisoner into Proctor's camp, denied his
powers. They continued to hold the enemy at bay until they were
enabled to capitulate on honorable terms, which, nevertheless, Proctor
shamefully violated, by leaving the sick and wounded who were unable
to walk to the tomahawk of his allies. Butler, who was among the few
of the wounded who escaped the massacre, was marched through Canada to
Fort Niagara--suffering under his wound, and every privation--oppressed
with grief, hunger, fatigue, and the inclement cold of that desolate
region. Even here he forgot himself, and his mind wandered back to the
last night scene which he surveyed on the bloody shores of the River
Raisin. He gave up the heroic part and became the schoolboy again, and
commemorated his sorrows for his lost friends in verse, like some
passionate, heart-broken lover. These elegiac strains were never
intended for any but the eye of mutual friends, whose sympathies, like
his own, poured out tears with their plaints over the dead. We give
some of these lines of his boyhood, to show that the heroic youth had
a bosom not less kind than brave.

THE FIELD OF RAISIN.

The battle's o'er! the din is past,
Night's mantle on the field is cast;
The Indian yell is heard no more,
An silence broods o'er Erie's shore.
At this lone hour I go to tread
The field where valor vainly bled--
To raise the wounded warrior's crest,