300 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
few indistinct surface irregularities, though excavation in such 
localities has rarely failed to bring to light some eloquent witness 
of the Siege—burial pits, cannon balls and bullets, or the remains 
of arms. At some points there have been extensive finds of 
tobacco-pipes, showing that the sturdy soldiery were not deprived 
of all creature comforts during their weary watches.* 
Another five-and-twenty years, and, at the rate at which Plymouth 
is growing, scarcely an exterior vestige of the Siege will remain. 
The whole of the ancient battle-fields will be covered with houses, 
and we shall be able to apply in its entirety, as we now can in part, 
the words of Dickens, in the “ Battle of Life ”— 
If the host slain in the field could have been for a moment reanimated in 
the forms in which they fell, each upon the spot that was the bed of his 
untimely death, gashed and ghastly soldiers would have stared in hundreds 
deep, at household door and window; and would have risen on the hearths of 
quiet homes; and would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; 
and would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and 
would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, and 
crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the rickyard high 
with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground where thousands and 
thousands had been killed in the great fight. 
It will not, I hope, be deemed by the members of this Society a 
waste of time that I have asked their attention to the narrative of 
one of the most important epochs in the history of our town, drawn 
from the most varied sources at my disposal, and recounted with 
such skill as I possess. To me, I confess, the task has been one of 
the pleasantest, though not the lightest, I have undertaken. Tracing 
the progress of events, and marking alike the trials and the braveries 
of the Siege period, sympathies have been aroused, and feelings 
strengthened, and I have waxed prouder and prouder of the old 
town, which in times of such terrible purpose, times of such vital 
consequence to the future of England, remained true—though, for 
the most part, these were very evil and shifting days indeed—to 
the cause which it at first deliberately espoused, and became thus 
the key-stone of freedom in this West of England. 
* There is an amusing appeal to the Parliament, of this date, from the.poor 
tobacco-pipe makers of London and Westminster against a pipe duty, on the 
ground that it would interfere with the trade by leading to the burning of 
foul pipes! 
