by Barkham Burroughs
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Battle of Chalons, where Attila the terrible King of the Huns, was repulsed by the Romans under Aetius, A.D. 451
Battle of Tours, in which the Saracen Turks invading Western Europe were utterly overthrown by the Franks under Charles Martel, A.D. 732.
Battle of Hastings, by which William the Conqueror became the ruler of England, Oct. 14, 1066.
Victory of the French under Joan of Arc over the English at Orleans, April 29, 1429.
Defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English naval force, July 29 and 30, 1588.
Battle of Blenheim, in which the French and Bavarians were defeated by the allied armies of Great Britain and Holland under the Duke of Marlborough, Aug. 2, 1704.
Battle of Pultowa, the Swedish army under Charles XII, defeated by the Russians under Peter the Great, July 8, 1709. Victory of the American army under General Gates over the British under General Burgoyne at Saratoga, Oct. 17, 1777.
Battle of Valmy where the allied armies of Prussia and Austria were defeated by the French under Marshal Kellerman. Sept. 20, 1792.
Battle of Waterloo, the allied forces of the British and Prussians defeated the French under Napoleon, the final overthrow of the great commander, June 18, 1815.
These battles are selected as decisive, because of the important consequences that followed them. Few students of history, probably, would agree with Prof. Creasy, in restricting the list as he does. Many other conflicts might be noted, fraught with great importance to the human race, and unquestionably "decisive" in their nature; as, for instance, the victory of Sobieski over the Turkish army at Vienna, Sept. 12, 1683. Had the Poles and Austrians been defeated there, the Turkish general might readily have fulfilled his threat "to stable his horses in the Church of St. Peter's at Rome," and all Western Europe would, no doubt, have been devastated by the ruthless and bloodthirsty Ottomans. Of important and decisive battles since that of Waterloo we may mention in our own Civil War those of Gettysburg, by which the invasion of the North was checked, and at Chattanooga, Nov. 23 and 25, 1863, by which the power of the Confederates in the southwest received a deadly blow.
THE WANDERING JEW.--There are various versions of the story of "The Wandering Jew," the legends of whom have formed the foundation of numerous romances, poems and tragedies. One version is that this person was a servant in the house of Pilate, and gave the Master a blow as He was being dragged out of the palace to go to His death. A popular tradition makes the wanderer a member of the tribe of Naphtali, who, some seven or eight years previous to the birth of the Christ-child left his father to go with the wise men of the East whom the star led to the lowly cot in Bethlehem. It runs, also, that the cause of the killing of the children can be traced to the stories this person related when he returned to Jerusalem of the visit of the wise men, and the presentation of the gifts they brought to the Divine Infant, when He was acknowledged by them to be the king of the Jews, He was lost sight of for a time, when he appeared as a carpenter who was employed in making the cross on which the Saviour was to be lifted up into the eyes of all men. As Christ walked up the way to Calvary, He had to pass the workshop of this man, and when He reached its door, the soldiers, touched by the sufferings of the Man of Sorrows, besought the carpenter to allow Him to rest there for a little, but he refused, adding insult to a want of charity. Then it is said that Christ pronounced his doom, which was to wander over the earth until the second coming. Since that sentence was uttered, he has wandered, courting death, but finding it not, and his punishment, becoming more unbearable as the generations come and go. He is said to have appeared in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even as recently as the eighteenth century, under the names of Cartaphilus, and Ahasuerus, by which the Wandering Jew has been known. One of the legends described him as a shoemaker of Jerusalem, at whose door Christ desired to rest on the road to Calvary, but the man refused, and the sentence to wander was pronounced.
SOME MEMORABLE DARK DAYS.--During the last hundred years there have been an unusually large number of dark days recorded. As has been suggested by several writers, this may have been the result of the careful
