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and court of offices. The house farms one side of a square and the offices the other three; the court yard, collecting the manure in the middle, and sheltering the cattle. The side opposite to the house is a long building for cows; the passage being separated from the cow’s stalls by a parapet above four feet high. At each end of the passage is a large door or gate, both of which were literally riddled with musket balls, fired from within, and from without, as could easily be distinguished from the kind of hole the ball had made. The bodies, after the action, were heaped up in the cow’s stalls, as high as the parapet. The whole farm house, yard, and offices, might have afforded room for 1000 or 1500 men to act. They had made holes for musketry all around the building; and many a hole had been made for them by the enemy. The whole presented a scene of shattered ruin, which could not be looked upon without a degree of interest amounting to terror. It stood a noble monument of the determined valour of our German brethren in arms.
Some very poor children who seemed to starve about the ruins soon joined us, and began to beg money from us with most persevering importunity. Their miserable appearance was in perfect agreement with the scene of desolation about them. We saw no grown people who seem’d to have any interest in the place.
Having succeeded in opening the shattered door which led out to the fields to the west, we saw several women still engaged in the lately most lucrative occupation of gleaning up any thing which they could sell to strangers. The same persons had, very probably, been active in stripping and plundering the slain. We asked them where they were during the action? — “All in the wood.” — Did they hear
