He alighted on the ground, and stood there with his head lowered and pushed into a dark angle of the bank, with his back to his enemies.
There could hardly be a doubt that it was a deliberate preparation for death, not an effort to escape. He had seen his enemies close beside him, and he knew he was in full sight. A proud savage, badly wounded, in the power of merciless foes, would have done precisely what this eagle did.
Next moment another gun flamed, and he fell backward, dead. He was a noble specimen of the bald-headed eagle—the national bird. This is the strong-winged one that, Audubon says, "can ascend until it disappears from view without any apparent motion of the wings or tail, and from the greatest height descends with a rapidity which cannot be followed by the eye."
"The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls."
Who said that the bald eagle was a coward? Audubon, I am sorry to see, believes the aspersion. Benjamin Franklin regretted that the bird was taken as the national emblem, because it was said to be mean, ungenerous, pusillanimous; that he
