be easily alarmed.
    Hetty seemed concerned, and she looked furtively about her, as if unwilling
any one but a child should hear what she had to communicate, and even that she
should learn it abruptly.
    »You know how it is with father, sometimes, Judith,« she said, »When
overtaken with liquor he does n't always know what he says, or does, and he
seems to be overtaken with liquor, now.«
    »That is strange! - Would the savages have drunk with him, and then leave
him behind? But tis a grievous sight to a child, Hetty, to witness such a
failing in a parent, and we will not go near him 'till he wakes.«
    A groan from the inner room, however, changed this resolution, and the girls
ventured near a parent, whom it was no unusual thing for them to find in a
condition that lowers a man to the level of brutes. He was seated, reclining in
a corner of the narrow room, with his shoulders supported by the angle, and his
head fallen heavily on his chest. Judith moved forward, with a sudden impulse,
and removed a canvass cap that was forced so low on his head as to conceal his
face, and indeed all but his shoulders. The instant this obstacle was taken
away, the quivering and raw flesh, the bared veins and muscles, and all the
other disgusting signs of mortality, as they are revealed by tearing away the
skin, showed he had been scalped, though still living.
 

                                  Chapter XXI

 »Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone,
 And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him;
 But nothing he'll reck, if they'll let him sleep on,
 In the grave where a Briton has laid him.«
                                                      Charles Wolfe, »The Burial
                                                         of Sir John Moore,« vi.
 
The reader must imagine the horror that daughters would experience, at
unexpectedly beholding the shocking spectacle that was placed before the eyes of
Judith and Esther, as related in the close of the last chapter. We shall pass
over the first emotions, the first acts of filial piety, and proceed with the
narrative, by imagining rather than relating most of the revolting features of
the scene. The mutilated and ragged head was bound up, the unseemly blood was
wiped from the face of the sufferer, the other appliances required by
appearances and care were resorted to, and there was time to enquire into the
more serious circumstances of the case. The facts were never known until years
later, in all their details