George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[312] thanksgiving for success, and when was success of

chap. XIII.} 1758.

greater importance? The connection between the sea side and the world beyond the mountains was established for ever; a vast territory was secured; the civilization of liberty and commerce and religion was henceforth ‘to maintain the undisputed possession of the Ohio.’ ‘These dreary deserts,’ wrote Forbes, ‘will soon be the richest and most fertile of any possessed by the British in North America.’

On the twenty-eighth, a numerous detachment went to Braddock's field, where their slaughtered comrades, after more than three years, lay yet unburied in the forest. Here and there a skeleton was found resting on the trunk of a fallen tree, as if a wounded man had sunk down in the attempt to fly In some places, wolves and crows had left signs of their ravages; in others, the blackness of ashes marked the scene of the revelry of cannibals. The trees still showed branches rent by cannon; trunks dotted with musket balls. Where the havoc had been the fiercest, bones lay whitening in confusion. None could be recognised, except that the son of Sir Peter Halket was called by the shrill whistle of a savage to the great tree near which his father and his brother had been seen to fall together; and while Benjamin West and a company of Pennsylvanians formed a circle around, the Indians removed the thick covering of leaves, till they bared the relics of the youth lying across those of the older officer. The frames of the two, thus united in death, were wrapped in a Highland plaid, and consigned to one separate grave, amidst the ceremonies that belong to the burial of the brave. The bones of the undistinguishable multitude, more than