and intertwisted their
prickly branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the furze, and the bramble
choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the brake; and where his track
had opened up a way through the fern, I could see the red and corroded
bars stretching idly across. There was a viaduct beside me: the flawed
and shattered masonry had exchanged its raw hues for a crust of
lichens; one of the taller piers, undermined by the stream, had drawn
two of the arches along with it, and lay adown the water-course a
shapeless mass of ruin, o'ermasted by flags and rushes. A huge ivy,
that had taken root under a neighbouring pier, threw up its long
pendulous shoots over the summit. I ascended to the top. Half-buried
in furze and sloe-thorn, there rested on the rails what had once been
a train of carriages; the engine ahead lay scattered in fragments, the
effect of some disastrous explosion, and damp, and mould, and
rottenness had done their work on the vehicles behind. Some had
already fallen to pieces, so that their places could be no longer
traced in the thicket that had grown up around them; others stood
comparatively entire, but their bleached and shrivelled panels rattled
to the wind, and the mushroom and the fungus sprouted from between
their joints. The scene bore all too palpably the marks of violence
and bloodshed. There was an open space in front, where the shattered
fragments of the engine lay scattered; and here the rails had been
torn up by violence, and there stretched across, breast-high, a rudely
piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened by the
winds; there was a broken pike beside it; and, stuck fast in the naked
skull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the rusty
fragment of a sword. The space behind resembled the floor of a
charnel-house--bindwood and ground-ivy lay matted over heaps of bones;
and on the top of the hugest heap of all, a skull seemed as if
grinning at the sky from amid the tattered fragments of a cap of
liberty. Bones lay thick around the shattered vehicles; a trail of
skeletons dotted the descending bank, and stretched far into a
neighbouring field; and from amid the green rankness that shot up
around them, I could see soiled and tattered patches of the British
scarlet. A little farther on there was another wide gap in the rails.
I marked beside the ruins of a neighbouring hovel a huge pile of rusty
bars, and there lay inside the fragment of an uncouth cannon marred in
the