I have just set down this account of Peter’s arrival and our discourse; and now it is late, and I am beside the fire, and I think with anxiousness on the stories of those skirmishes to the south of this town, which even now preserve us from the enemy.

We have not seen that violence here. We are not sensible of it. In this town, all is linearity and training. To fire muskets is not an act of war, but a routine with which we, ranked in concert, take up the hours between ten and noon. A fortification is a task, a line, a curve, not a bulwark. The arts of war are mere geometry.

The regularity of drills has soothed, rather than excited, my more ardent passions; and I try now in vain to paint what those orderly ranks shall look like, were there grapeshot tearing through us, raining metal droplets from the skies on our open mouths.

I recall the strife upon Hog and Noddle’s Islands, when the grass burned and the beach puckered with the shot of Marines. I put my life at hazard there, which some might account valor; but I knew it for the rashness of despair, the precipitation of utter despondence. Now that I am actuated by hopes more active — by anger at injustice and demand for benevolence — I fear I shall not be so reckless of my life.

I have wondered lately about death. I attempt to recall that it is but an assumption into a better realm; and yet I cannot envision past the stifling eternal silence of it, as were one locked in ice, with the world entertaining its commerce above — and I lying cold, below, aching to move, with the chill invading the flesh.

I had best prepare myself for action; the word is, it shall come soon.