X.
The morning-star is in the sky—
The signal word is given,
And a hundred blazing torches flash
In the starry vault of heaven;
And from a hundred blazing homes
Rings out a piercing cry,
As the sleeper wakes, and the flames of death
Glare on his waking eye.
But a wilder scream, a fiendish yell,
Comes back to his ear again,
As he rushes out, and a savage blow
Has crush’d him to the plain.
When morning came, the sun look’d down
Where many a cottage stood;
But he only saw black smouldering heaps,
And fields that smoked with blood.{[28]}
In all the outer settlements
The work of death was o’er,
And full three hundred colonists
Lay weltering in their gore.