At last, late in the afternoon, the battle came to an end. The Indians, finding it impossible to drive the hunters from behind their barrier, suddenly withdrew, and taking their dead with them, disappeared over the hill down which they had dashed in the morning. They might make another attack, but for the present all was safe, and Jean Bedell might rejoin his friends. When he reached them, he found that though they were rejoiced to have driven off the hated Sioux, their joy was mingled with much sorrow, for there were many dead to be buried, and many wounded to be cared for. Among the dead were several of the little children, to whom stray bullets had found their way; and when Jean Bedell and his wife saw the poor little bodies, they were very thankful that, on account of a broken harness, their own darling baby had been kept at a safe distance from the terrible battle.
[Begun in Harper's Young People No. 24, April 13.]
THE STORY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON.
BY EDWARD CARY.
Chapter VIII.
I have said that the work which President Washington had to do was quite new to the country. The people had been used to having all their affairs attended to in their own States. None of the States was very large. Some of them were very small, compared with what the States are now, so that the public men in each were known by a greater part of the people than they now are. Then distance seemed greater than it does now. It took nearly as long to go from Boston to New York as it now does to go from Boston to California; there was no telegraph any more than there were railways and steam-boats, and news travelled as slowly as men did themselves. You can see that it was harder for people in Georgia or New Hampshire to know what was going on in New York than it is now for people in Oregon or Florida to know what is being done in Washington. Where there is ignorance there is always more distrust and doubt. Men found it not easy to give up public business to a Congress, far away, that they did not know much about. Washington set himself earnestly at work to try and have things done so carefully, so honestly, and so wisely, that the people would learn to trust the national government, and live happily under it.
The national government had been meant especially to do three things: First, to raise money and pay the debts of all the States; second, to see that the country was rightly dealt with by other countries, and that other countries were justly treated by our own; and third, in a general way to do for the common good what no one State could do by itself.
The government has now for nearly a hundred years done this work very well, and that fact is largely due to the way George Washington began it. He was President for eight years.
It would not be easy to tell all the things he did in that time which have had a good effect ever since, but it will be well to remember a few of the principal ones. He always insisted on the full and honest payment of the public debt, that is, of money borrowed by the government to carry on the war, and so forth. He believed that a nation must keep its word as much as a man must, if it expects other people to deal fairly with it.