dated and disheartened. They consequently looked
forward to the battle with uneasiness and anxiety, while the army of
Hannibal anticipated it with eagerness and pleasure.

The battle came on, at last, very suddenly, and at a moment when
neither party were expecting it. A large detachment of both armies
were advancing toward the position of the other, near the River
Ticinus, to reconnoiter, when they met, and the battle began. Hannibal
advanced with great impetuosity, and sent, at the same time, a
detachment around to attack his enemy in the rear. The Romans soon
began to fall into confusion; the horsemen and foot soldiers got
entangled together; the men were trampled upon by the horses, and the
horses were frightened by the men. In the midst of this scene, Scipio
received a wound. A consul was a dignitary of very high consideration.
He was, in fact, a sort of semi-king. The officers, and all the
soldiers, so fast as they heard that the consul was wounded, were
terrified and dismayed, and the Romans began to retreat. Scipio had a
young son, named also Scipio, who was then about twenty years of age.
He was fighting by the side of his father when he received his wound.
He protected his father, got him into the center of a compact body of
cavalry, and moved slowly off the ground, those in the rear facing
toward the enemy and beating them back, as they pressed on in pursuit
of them. In this way they reached their camp. Here they stopped for
the night. They had fortified the place, and, as night was coming on,
Hannibal thought it not prudent to press on and attack them there. He
waited for the morning. Scipio, however, himself wounded and his army
discouraged, thought it not prudent for him to wait till the morning.
At midnight he put his whole force in motion on a retreat. He kept the
camp-fires burning, and did every thing else in his power to prevent
the Carthaginians observing any indications of his departure. His army
marched secretly and silently till they reached the river. They
recrossed it by the bridge they had built, and then, cutting away the
fastenings by which the different rafts were held together, the
structure was at once destroyed, and the materials of which it was
composed floated away, a mere mass of ruins, down the stream. From
the Ticinus they floated, we may imagine, into the Po, and thence down
the Po into the Adriatic Sea, where they drifted about upon the waste
of waters till they were at last, one a