The Battle of Life | Page 4

a leaf or blade would grow.
For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower
from that field of death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing
there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that plucked them.
The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as lightly as the summer clouds
themselves, obliterated, in the lapse of time, even these remains of the old conflict; and

wore away such legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people carried in their minds,
until they dwindled into old wives' tales, dimly remembered round the winter fire, and
waning every year. Where the wild flowers and berries had so long remained upon the
stem untouched, gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at battles on
the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared
away. The deep green patches were no greener now than the memory of those who lay in
dust below. The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal,
but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them
wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the
church so long, that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make them out
above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a baby. If the host slain upon the
field, could have been for a moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each
upon the spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly soldiers would
have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and window; and would have risen on
the hearths of quiet homes; and would have been the garnered store of barns and
granaries; and would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and would
have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, and crowded the orchard,
and burdened the meadow, and piled the rickyard high with dying men. So altered was
the battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight.
Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in one little orchard
attached to an old stone house with a honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn
morning, there were sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily
together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing on ladders,
gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work to look down, and share their
enjoyment. It was a pleasant, lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the
two girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and gaiety of their
hearts.
If there were no such thing as display in the world, my private opinion is, and I hope you
agree with me, that we might get on a great deal better than we do, and might be
infinitely more agreeable company than we are. It was charming to see how these girls
danced. They had no spectators but the apple-pickers on the ladders. They were very glad
to please them, but they danced to please themselves (or at least you would have
supposed so); and you could no more help admiring, than they could help dancing. How
they did dance!
Not like opera-dancers. Not at all. And not like Madame Anybody's finished pupils. Not
the least. It was not quadrille dancing, nor minuet dancing, nor even country-dance
dancing. It was neither in the old style, nor the new style, nor the French style, nor the
English style: though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in the Spanish style, which is
a free and joyous one, I am told, deriving a delightful air of off-hand inspiration, from the
chirping little castanets. As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of
stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and round, the influence of
their airy motion seemed to spread and spread, in the sun-lighted scene, like an expanding
circle in the water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic grass beneath
their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning air - the flashing leaves, the speckled
shadows on the soft green ground - the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad
to turn the distant windmill, cheerily - everything between the two girls, and the man and

team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they showed against the sky as if they were
the last things in the world - seemed dancing too.
At last, the younger of the dancing