d for
three hours distributed his commander's orders, with the deadly missiles
flying around him like hailstones. Dr. Craik said:

"I expected to see him fall every moment. He dashed over the field,
reckless of death, when the bullets whistled about him on every side.
Why he was not killed I cannot divine, unless a watchful Providence was
preserving him for more important work."

One of the principal Indian warriors fired at him again and again; and,
at his bidding, a score of young braves did the same, without so much as
grazing his skin, keeping up their fire until convinced that the Great
Spirit had given to him a charmed life that he might not be shot in
battle.

Mr. Paulding gives the description of an eye-witness thus:

"I saw him take hold of a brass field-piece as if it had been a stick.
He looked like a fury; he tore the sheet-lead from the touch-hole, he
placed one hand on the muzzle, the other on the breach; he pulled with
this and he pushed with that, and wheeled it round as if it had been
nothing. It tore the ground like a plough. The powder monkey rushed up
with the fire, and then the cannon began to bark, I tell you. They
fought and they fought, and the Indians yelled when the rest of the
brass cannon made the bark of the trees fly, and the Indians came down.
That place they call Rock Hill, and there they left five hundred men
dead on the ground."

A bullet struck Washington's gold watch-seal, and knocked it from his
chain. Eighty years after the battle that seal was found by a visitor to
the battle ground, and it is now preserved among the relics of the
Washington family.

The English officers behaved heroically, and won Washington's admiration
by their bravery; but the English _soldiers_ acted like cowards.
Panic-stricken in the first place, they did not recover from their
consternation during the engagement. The unearthly yells of the savages,
which they had never heard before, seemed to terrify them even more than
the whistling of bullets. They lost self-control, disregarded the orders
of their officers, and ran hither and thither like frightened sheep.
Sixty-three of the eighty-five English officers were killed or wounded,
a fact that shows how bravely they fought.

General Braddock proved himself a brave and faithful commander. He did
all that mortal man could do to save his army, exposing himself to death
from first to last. After three hours of hard fighting, during which
time four horses