The news of the great fights of Quatre Bras and Waterloo reached

England at the same time. The Gazette first published the result of

the two battles; at which glorious intelligence all England thrilled

with triumph and fear. Particulars then followed; and after the

announcement of the victories came the list of the wounded and the

slain. Who can tell the dread with which that catalogue was opened and

read! Fancy, at every village and homestead almost through the three

kingdoms, the great news coming of the battles in Flanders, and the

feelings of exultation and gratitude, bereavement and sickening dismay,

when the lists of the regimental losses were gone through, and it

became known whether the dear friend and relative had escaped or

fallen. Anybody who will take the trouble of looking back to a file of

the newspapers of the time, must, even now, feel at second-hand this

breathless pause of expectation. The lists of casualties are carried

on from day to day: you stop in the midst as in a story which is to be

continued in our next. Think what the feelings must have been as those

papers followed each other fresh from the press; and if such an

interest could be felt in our country, and about a battle where but

twenty thousand of our people were engaged, think of the condition of

Europe for twenty years before, where people were fighting, not by

thousands, but by millions; each one of whom as he struck his enemy

wounded horribly some other innocent heart far away.

The news which that famous Gazette brought to the Osbornes gave a

dreadful shock to the family and its chief. The girls indulged

unrestrained in their grief. The gloom-stricken old father was still

more borne down by his fate and sorrow. He strove to think that a

judgment was on the boy for his disobedience. He dared not own that

the severity of the sentence frightened him, and that its fulfilment

had come too soon upon his curses. Sometimes a shuddering terror

struck him, as if he had been the author of the doom which he had

called down on his son. There was a chance before of reconciliation.

The boy's wife might have died; or he might have come back and said,

Father I have sinned. But there was no hope now. He stood on the

other side of the gulf impassable, haunting his parent with sad eyes.

He remembered them once before so in a fever, when every one thought

the lad was dying, and he lay on his bed speechless, and gazing with a

dreadful gloom. Good God! how the father clung to the doctor then, and

with what a sickening anxiety he followed him: what a weight of grief

was off his mind when, after the crisis of the fever, the lad

recovered, and looked at his father once more with eyes that recognised

him. But now there was no help or cure, or chance of reconcilement:

above all, there were no humble words to soothe vanity outraged and

furious, or bring to its natural flow the poisoned, angry blood. And

it is hard to say which pang it was that tore the proud father's heart

most keenly--that his son should have gone out of the reach of his

forgiveness, or that the apology which his own pride expected should

have escaped him.




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