Chapter 27

REQUIESCAT IN PACE.

It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock on a
Fourth of July; and half an hour after landing, hustled by the riotous
crowd near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run over by
a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered banner,
inscribed with gilt letters:

"BUNKER-HILL

1775.

GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT!"

It was on Copps' Hill, within the city bounds, one of the enemy's
positions during the fight, that our wanderer found his best repose that
day. Sitting down here on a mound in the graveyard, he looked off across
Charles River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient monument, at
that period, was hard to see, as a struggling sprig of corn in a chilly
spring. Upon those heights, fifty years before, his now feeble hands had
wielded both ends of the musket. There too he had received that slit
upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair with the Serapis, being
traversed by a cutlass wound, made him now the bescarred bearer of a
cross.

For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about him. The sultry July
day was waning. His son sought to cheer him a little ere rising to
return to the lodging for the present assigned them by the ship-captain.
"Nay," replied the old man, "I shall get no fitter rest than here by the
mounds."

But from this true "Potter's Field," the boy at length drew him away;
and encouraged next morning by a voluntary purse made up among the
reassembled passengers, father and son started by stage for the country
of the Housatonie. But the exile's presence in these old mountain
townships proved less a return than a resurrection. At first, none knew
him, nor could recall having heard of him. Ere long it was found, that
more than thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his family
in that region, a bachelor, following the example of three-fourths of
his neighbors, had sold out and removed to a distant country in the
west; where exactly, none could say.

He sought to get a glimpse of his father's homestead. But it had been
burnt down long ago. Accompanied by his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted,
he next went to find the site. But the roads had years before been
changed. The old road was now browsed over by sheep; the new one ran
straight through what had formerly been orchards. But new orchards,
planted from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes
near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel. At
length he came to a field waving with buckwheat. It seemed one of those
fields which himself had often reaped. But it turned out, upon inquiry,
that but three summers since a walnut