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ARTS OF THE PARTISAN.
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scenes as imagination cannot well conceive, or poetry of herself depict. He would show us the rude forester, as, passing from his farmstead to the swamp, flying from the marauder, he became, in time, the adroit partisan, under the ablest leaders. How the necessity, ever present, and usually in the aspect of a pressing danger, brought out all the resources of a natural art, and taught him in a thousand stratagems. How he grew, in time, to be as stealthy as the fox, and as subtle as the serpent. How he grew, in time, to practise all the arts of all the natural inhabitants of swamp and thicket: to imitate the cry of the bird, the stealth of the beast, the speed of the eagle, the fierce valour of the tiger! How to snare and circumvent the foe! How, imbedding himself in the covering leaves and branches of the thick-limbed tree, he would lie in wait till the fall of evening; then, dropping suddenly upon the shoulders of the sentry as he paced beneath, would drive the keen knife into his heart, before he could yet recover from his panic. How he would burrow in the hollow of the miry ditch, and crawling, Indian fashion, into the trench, wait patiently until the soldier came into the moonlight, when the silver drop at his rifle's muzzle fell with fatal accuracy upon his button, or his breastplate, and the sharp sudden crack which followed almost invariably announced the victim's long sleep of death. And a thousand legends besides would he teach us, making them live to our eyes, and work like passion in our souls, of which tradition and history speak but faintly, and of the arts and valour by which our partisans grew enabled to neutralize the superiority of European force and tactics. Often and again have they lain close to the gushing spring, and silent in the bush, like the tiger in his jungle, awaiting until the foragers had squatted around it for the enjoyment of their midday meal; then, rushing forth with a fierce halloo, seizing upon the stacked arms, and beating down the surprised but daring soldiers who might rise up to defend them. And this sort of warfare, small though it may appear, was at last triumphant. The successes of the patriots, during the whole period of the revolutionary contest in the south, were almost entirely the result of the rapid, unexpected movement—the sudden stroke made by the little troop, familiar with its ground, knowing its object, and melting away at the approach of a superior enemy,