In that same spot, a great pool of night-glow between two forest-
crowned ridges, it had lain for hundreds of years. He passed the
ancient landing-place of rocks, built a hundred and fifty years
ago for the first ships that came over the strange sea; he stood
upon the tumbled foundations of the Fort, that was still older,
and saw the starlight glinting on one of the brass cannon that lay
where it had fallen amid the debris, untouched and unmoved since
the days, ages-gone, when it had last thundered its welcome or its
defiance through the solitudes; he walked slowly along the shore
where the sea had lashed wearily for many a year, to reach the
wilderness dead, and where now, triumphant, the frothing surf
bared gun-case coffins and tumbled the bones of men down into its
sullen depths. And such men! Men who had lived and died when the
world was unborn in a half of its knowledge and science, when red
blood was the great capital, strong hearts the winners of life.
And there were women, too, women who had come with these men, and
died with them, in the opening-up of a new world. It was such men
as these, and such women as these, that Philip loved, and he
walked with bared head and swiftly beating heart over the unmarked
jungle of the dead.
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