an
left the defenceless inhabitants exposed to the horrors of a border
war. Col. Dunbar was not, by any means, the true soldier just hinted
at; and consequently did no such thing. Seeing that the sick and
wounded were but so many clogs to rapid and easy motion, he resolved
to leave them behind under the care of the slender garrison he had
placed in the fort, who were expected to defend it against an enemy
that he, with a force of fifteen hundred strong, had not the courage
to face. Thus rid of his hinderances to the last degree of
lightsomeness, he pushed on by forced marches, as if a legion of
painted savages were yelling at his heels; and never slackened speed
until he found himself safe within the friendly walls of Philadelphia,
where he went into comfortable winter-quarters while yet the dog-days
were at their hottest.

Thus basely deserted by these doughty regulars, who had been sent
over so many thousand miles of salt water for their protection,
the colonists saw with dismay the whole line of their vast frontier,
from Lake Ontario to the Carolinas, open to the inroads of the
French and their Indian allies. In the long-run, however (as you
shall see hereafter), two luckier mishaps than Braddock's defeat
and Dunbar's retreat, that seemed at the time so fraught with evil,
could not have befallen them. They were thereby taught two wholesome
lessons, which they might otherwise have been a long time in learning,
and without which they never could have gained their independence
and made themselves a nation. The first, by proving that British
regulars were not, by any means, the never-to-be-beaten, and the
never-to-be-made-to-skedaddle warriors that they boasted themselves to
be, and that one-half of the Americans were foolish enough to believe
them to be. Thus, when the War of Independence broke out, our
Revolutionary fathers remembered this, and were not afraid to meet the
English even on such unequal terms. The second, by opening their eyes
to the fact, that, as they (the colonists) could no longer look to the
mother-country for protection, they must henceforward rely upon their
own strength and resources for their defence and safety.

The people of Virginia, seeing the forlorn condition of things, were
at last awakened to a full sense of the danger that threatened, not
only their back settlements, but even the heart of the Old Dominion
itself. They therefore began to bestir themselves in right good
earnest to put t