Lucy had discreetly wandered away, and of how they made it up there were no witnesses. But it seems likely that they did so, for shortly after they wandered away together down the darkening street.

Like most of the Plainfield houses, that at which Mr. Morgan turned in stood well back from the street. At a side window, still further sheltered from view by a syringa-bush at the house corner, sat a little woman with a small pale face, the still attractive features perceptibly sharpened by years, of which the half-gray hair bore further testimony. The eyes, just now fixed absently upon the dusking landscape, were light gray and a little faded, while around the lips there were crowsfeet, especially when they were pressed together, as now, in an unsatisfied, almost pathetic look, evidently habitual to her face when in repose. There was withal something in her features that so reminded you of Mr. Morgan that any one conversant with the facts of his life-romance would have at once inferred—though by just what logic he might not be able to explain—that this must be Miss Rood. It is well known that long-wedded couples often gain at length a certain resemblance in feature and manner; and although these two were not married, yet their intimacy of a lifetime was perhaps the reason why her face bore when in repose something of that seer-like expression which communion with the bodiless shapes of memory had given to his.

The latching of the gate broke up her depressing revery and banished the pinched and pining look from her features. Among the neighbors Miss Rood was sometimes called a sour old maid, but the face she kept for Mr. Morgan would never have suggested that idea to the most ill-natured critic.

He stopped at the window, near which the walk passed to the doorway, and stood leaning on the sill—a tall slender figure, stooping a little, with smooth scholarly face and thin iron-gray hair. His only noticeable feature was a pair of eyes whose expression and glow indicated an imaginative temperament. It was pleasant to observe the relieved restlessness in the look and manner of the two friends, as if at the mere being in each other's presence, though neither seemed in any haste to exchange even the words of formal greeting.

At length she said in a tone of quiet satisfaction, "I knew you would come, for I was sure this deathly autumn's flavor would make you restless. Isn't it strange how it affects the nerves of memory and makes one sad with thinking of all the sweet dear days that are dead?"

"Yes, yes," he answered eagerly: "I can think of nothing else. Do they not seem wonderfully clear and near to-night? To-night, of all nights in the year, if the figures and scenes of memory can be re-embodied in visible forms, they ought to become so to the eyes that strain and yearn for them."

"What a fanciful idea, Robert!"

"I don't know that it is: I don't feel sure. Nobody understands the mystery of this Past, or what are the conditions of existence in that world. These memories, these forms and faces, that are so near, so almost warm and visible that we find ourselves smiling on the vacant air where they seem to be, are they not real and living?"

"You don't mean you believe in ghosts?"

"I am not talking of ghosts of the dead, but of ghosts of the past—memories of scenes or persons, whether the persons are dead or not—of our own selves as well as others. Why," he continued, his voice softening into a passionate, yearning tenderness, "the figure I would give most to see just once more is yourself as a girl, as I remember you in the sweet grace and beauty of your maidenhood. Ah well! ah well!"

"Don't!" she cried involuntarily, while her features contracted in sudden pain.

In the years during which his passion for her had been cooling into a staid friendship his imagination had been recurring with constantly increasing fondness and a dreamy passion to the memory of her girlhood. And the cruellest part of it was that he so unconsciously and unquestioningly assumed that she could not have identity enough with that girlish ideal to make his frequent glowing references to it even embarrassing. Generally, however, she heard and made no sign, but the suddenness of his outburst just now had taken her off her guard.

He glanced up with some surprise at her exclamation, but was too much interested in his subject to take much notice of it. "You know," he said, "there are great differences in the distinctness with which we can bring up our memories. Very well! The only question is, What is the limit to that distinctness, or is there any? Since we know there are such wide degrees in distinctness, the burden of proof rests on those who would prove that those degrees stop short of any particular point. Don't you see, then, that it might be possible to see them?" And to enforce his meaning he laid his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the window-seat.

She withdrew it instantly from the contact, and a slight flush tinged her sallow cheeks. The only outward trace of her memory of their youthful relations was the almost prudish chariness of her person by which she indicated a sense of the line to be drawn between the former lover and the present friend.

"Something in your look just now," he said, regarding her musingly, as one who seeks to trace the lineaments of a dead face in a living one, "reminds me of you as you used to sit in this very window as a girl, and I stood just here, and we picked out stars together. There! now it's gone;" and he turned away regretfully.

She looked at his averted face with a blank piteousness which revealed all her secret. She would not have had him see it for worlds, but it was a relief just for a moment to rest her features in the sad cast which the muscles had grown tired in repressing. The autumn scent rose stronger as the air grew damp, and he stood breathing it in, and apparently feeling its influence like some Delphian afflatus.

"Is there anything, Mary—is there anything so beautiful as that light of eternity that rests on the figures of memory? Who that has once felt it can care for the common daylight of the present any more, or take pleasure in its prosaic groups?"

"You'll certainly catch cold standing in that wet grass: do come in and let me shut the blinds," she said, for she had found cheerful lamplight the best corrective for his vagaries.

So he came in and sat in his special arm-chair, and they chatted about miscellaneous village topics for an hour. The standpoint from which they canvassed Plainfield people and things was a peculiarly outside one. Their circle of two was like a separate planet from which they observed the world. Their tone was like, and yet quite unlike, that in which a long-married couple discuss their acquaintances; for, while their intellectual intimacy was perfect, their air expressed a constant mutual deference and solicitude of approbation not to be confounded with the terrible familiarity of matrimony; and at the same time they constituted a self-sufficient circle, apart from the society around them, as man and wife cannot. Man and wife are so far merged as to feel themselves a unit over against society. They are too much identified to find in each other that sense of support and countenance which requires a feeling of the exteriority of our friend's life to our own. If these two should marry they would shortly find themselves impelled to seek refuge in conventional relations with that society of which now they were calmly independent.

At length Mr. Morgan rose and threw open the blinds. The radiance of the full harvest-moon so flooded the room that Miss Rood was fain to blow out the poor lamp for compassion. "Let us take a walk," he said.

The streets were empty and still, and they walked in silence, spelled by the perfect beauty of the evening. The dense shadows of the elms lent a peculiarly rich effect to the occasional bars and patches of moonlight on the street floor; the white houses gleamed among their orchards; and here and there, between the dark tree-stems, there were glimpses of the shining surface of the broad outlying meadows, which looked like a surrounding sea.

Miss Rood was startled to see how the witchery of the scene possessed her companion. His face took on a set, half-smiling expression, and he dropped her arm as if they had arrived at the place of entertainment to which he had been escorting her. He no longer walked with measured pace, but glided along with a certain stealthiness, peering on this side and that down moony vistas and into shadow-bowers, as if half expecting, if he might step lightly enough, to catch a glimpse of some sort of dream-people basking there.

Nor could Miss Rood herself resist the impression the moony landscape gave of teeming with subtle forms of life, escaping the grosser senses of human beings, but perceptible by their finer parts. Each cosey nook of light and shadow was yet warm from some presence that had just left it. The landscape fairly stirred with ethereal forms of being beneath the fertilizing moon-rays, as the earth-mould wakes into physical life under the sun's heat. The yellow moonlight looked warm as spirits might count warmth. The air was electric with the thrill of circumambient existence. There was the sense of pressure, of a throng. It would have been impossible to feel lonely. The pulsating sounds of the insect world seemed the rhythm to which the voluptuous beauty of the night had spontaneously set itself. The common air of day had been transmuted into the atmosphere of revery and Dreamland. In that magic medium the distinction between imagination and reality fast dissolved. Even Miss Rood was conscious of a delightful excitement, a vague expectancy. Mr. Morgan, she saw, was moved quite beyond even his exaggerated habit of imaginative excitement. His wet, shining, wide-opened eyes and ecstatic expression indicated complete abandonment to the illusions of the scene.

They had seated themselves, as the concentration of the brain upon imaginative activity made the nerves of motion sluggish, upon a rude bench formed by wedging a plank between two elms that stood close together. They were within the shadow of the trees, but close up to their feet rippled a lake of moonlight. The landscape shimmering before them had been the theatre of their fifty years of life. Their history was written in its trees and lawns and paths. The very air of the place had acquired for them a dense, warm, sentient feeling, to which that of all other places was thin and raw. It had become tinctured by their own spiritual emanations, by the thoughts, looks, words and moods of which it had so long received the impression. It had become such vitalized air, surcharged with sense and thought, as might be taken to make souls for men out of.

Over yonder, upon the playground, yet lingered the faint violet fragrance of their childhood. Beneath that elm a kiss had once touched the air with a fire that still warmed their cheeks in passing. Yonder the look of a face was cut on the viewless air as on marble. Surely, death does but touch the living, for the dead ever keep their power over us: it is only we who lose ours over them. Each vista of leafy arch and distant meadow framed in some scene of their youth-time, painted in the imperishable hues of memory that borrow from time an ever-richer and more glowing tint. It was no wonder that to these two old people, sitting on the bench between the elms, the atmosphere before them, saturated with associations, dense with memories, should seem fairly quivering into material forms like a distant mist turning to rain.

At length Miss Rood heard her companion say, in a whisper of tremulous exultation, "Do you know, Mary, I think I shall see them very soon."

"See whom?" she asked, frightened at his strange tone.

"Why, see us, of course, as I was telling you," he whispered—"you and me as we were young—see them as I see you now. Don't you remember it was just along here that we used to walk on spring evenings? We walk here no more, but they do evermore, beautiful, beautiful children. I come here often to lie in wait for them. I can feel them now: I can almost, almost see them." His whisper became scarcely audible and the words dropped slowly. "I know the sight is coming, for every day they grow more vivid. It can't be long before I quite see them. It may come at any moment."

Miss Rood was thoroughly frightened at the intensity of his excitement, and terribly perplexed as to what she should do.

"It may come at any time: I can almost see them now," he murmured. "A—h! look!" With parted lips and unspeakably intense eyes, as if his life were flowing out at them, he was staring across the moonlit paths before them to the point where the path debouched from the shadow.

Following his eyes, she saw what for a moment made her head swim with the thought that she too was going mad. Just issuing from the shadows, as if in answer to his words, were a young man and a girl, his arm upon her waist, his eyes upon her face. At the first glance Miss Rood was impressed with a resemblance to her own features in those of the girl, which her excitement exaggerated to a perfect reproduction of them. For an instant the conviction possessed her that by some impossible, indescribable, inconceivable miracle she was looking upon the resurrected figures of her girlish self and her lover.

At first, Mr. Morgan had half started from his seat, and was between rising and sitting. Then he rose with a slow, involuntary movement, while his face worked terribly between bewilderment and abandonment to illusion. He tottered forward a few steps to the edge of the moonlight, and stood peering at the approaching couple with a hand raised to shade his eyes and a dazed, unearthly smile on his face. The girl saw him first, for she had been gazing demurely before her, while her lover looked only at her. At sight of the gray-haired man suddenly confronting them with a look of bedlam, she shrieked and started back in terror. Miss Rood, recalled to her senses, sprang forward, and catching Mr. Morgan's arm endeavored with gentle force to draw him away.

But it was too late for that. The young man, at first almost as much startled as his companion at the uncanny apparition, naturally experienced a revulsion of indignation at such an extraordinary interruption to his tête-à-tête, and stepped up to Mr. Morgan as if about to inflict summary chastisement. But perceiving that he had to do with an elderly man, he contented himself with demanding in a decidedly aggressive tone what the devil he meant by such a performance.

Mr. Morgan stared at him without seeing him, and evidently did not take in the words. He merely gasped once or twice, and looked as if he had fainted away on his feet. His blank, stunned expression showed that his faculties were momentarily benumbed by the shock. Miss Rood felt as if she should die for the pity of it as she looked at his face, and her heart was breaking for grief as she sought to mollify the young man with some inarticulate words of apology, meanwhile still endeavoring to draw Mr. Morgan away. But at this moment the girl, recovering from her panic, came up to the group and laid her hand on the young man's arm, as if to check and silence him. It was evident that she saw there was something quite unusual in the circumstances, and the look which she bent upon Mr. Morgan was one of sympathy and considerate interrogation. But Miss Rood could see no way out of their awkward situation, which grew more intolerable every moment as they thus confronted each other. It was finally Mr. Morgan's voice, quite firm, but with an indescribable sadness in the tones, which broke the silence: "Young people, I owe you an apology, such as it is. I am an old man, and the past is growing so heavy that it sometimes quite over-balances me. My thoughts have been busy to-night with the days of my youth, and the spell of memory has been so strong that I have not been quite myself. As you came in view I actually entertained the incredible idea for a moment that somehow I saw in you the materialized memories of myself and another as we once walked this same path."

The young man bowed as Mr. Morgan ended in a manner indicating his acceptance of the apology, although he looked both amazed and amused. But the explanation had a very different effect upon the girl at his side. As she listened her eyes had filled with tears and her face had taken on a wonderfully tender, pitiful smile. When he ended speaking, she impulsively said, "I'm so sorry we were not what you thought us! Why not pretend we are, to-night at least? We can pretend it, you know. The moonlight makes anything possible;" and then glancing at Miss Rood, she added, as if almost frightened, "Why, how much we look alike! I'm not sure it isn't true, anyway."

This was, in fact, an unusually marked example of those casual resemblances between strangers which are sometimes seen. The hair of the one was indeed gray and that of the other dark, but the eyes were of the same color by night, and the features, except for the greater fulness of the younger face, were cast in the same mould, while figure and bearing were strikingly similar, although daylight would doubtless have revealed diversities enough that moonlight refused to disclose.

The two women looked at each other with an expression almost of suspicion and fear, while the young man observed, "Your mistake was certainly excusable, sir."

"It will be the easier to pretend," said the girl as with a half-serious, half-sportive imperiousness she laid her hand on Mr. Morgan's arm. "And now it is thirty years ago, and we are walking together." He involuntarily obeyed the slight pressure, and they walked slowly away, leaving the other two after an embarrassed pause to follow them.

For some time they walked in silence. He was deliberately abandoning himself to the illusion, supported as it was by the evidence of his senses, that he was wandering in some of the mysterious between-worlds which he had so often dreamed of, with the love of his youth in her youth-time charm. Did he really believe it to be so? Belief is a term quite irrelevant to such a frame as his, in which the reflective and analytical powers are for a time purposely held in abeyance. The circumstances of her introduction to him had dropped from his mind as irrelevant accidents, like the absurdities which occur in our sweetest and most solemn dreams without marring their general impression in our memories. Every glance he threw upon his companion, while on the one hand it shocked his illusion in that she seemed not likely to vanish away, on the other strengthened it with an indescribable thrill by the revelation of some fresh trait of face or figure, some new expression, that reproduced the Miss Rood of his youth. Not, indeed, that it is likely his companion was thus perfectly the double of that lady, although so much resembling her, but the common graces of maidenhood were in Mr. Morgan's mind the peculiar personal qualities of the only woman he had ever much known.

Of his own accord he would not have dared to risk breaking the charm by a word. But his companion—who, as is tolerably evident by this time, was Mabel French—had meanwhile formed a scheme quite worthy of her audacious temper. She had at once recognized both Mr. Morgan and Miss Rood, and had gone thus far from a mere romantic impulse, without definite intentions of any sort. But the idea now came into her head that she might take advantage of this extraordinary situation to try a matchmaking experiment, which instantly captivated her fancy. So she said, while ever so gently pressing his arm and looking up into his face with an arch smile (she was recognized as the best amateur actress in her set at home), "I wonder if the moon will be so mellow after we are married?"

His illusion was rudely disturbed by the shock of an articulate voice, softly and low as she spoke, and he looked around with a startled expression that made her fear her rôle was ended. But she could not know that the eyes she turned to his were mirrors where he saw his dead youth. The two Miss Roods—the girl and the woman, the past and the present—were fused and become one in his mind. Their identity flashed upon him.

An artesian well sunk from the desert surface through the underlying strata, the layers of ages, strikes some lake long ago covered over, and the water welling up converts the upper waste into a garden. Just so at her words and her look his heart suddenly filled, as if it came from afar, with the youthful passion he had felt toward Miss Rood, but which, he knew not exactly when or how, had been gradually overgrown with the dulness of familiarity and had lapsed into an indolent affectionate habit. The warm voluptuous pulse of this new feeling—new, and yet instantly recognized as old—brought with it a flood of youthful associations, and commingled the far past with the present in a confusion more complete and more intoxicating than ever. He saw double again. "Married!" he murmured dreamily. "Yes, surely, we will be married."

And as he spoke he looked at her with such a peculiar expression that she was a little frightened. It looked like a more serious business than she had counted on, and for a moment if she could have cut and run, perhaps she would have done so. But she had a strain of the true histrionic artist about her, and with a little effort rose to the difficulty of the rôle. "Of course we will be married," she replied with an air of innocent surprise. "You speak as if you had just thought of it."

He turned toward her as if he would sober his senses by staring at her, his pupils dilating and contracting in the instinctive effort to clear the mind by clearing the eyes.

But with a steady pressure on his arm she compelled him to walk on by her side. Then she said, in a soft low voice, as if a little awed by what she were telling, while at the same time she nestled nearer his side, "I had such a sad dream last night, and your strange talk reminds me of it. It seemed as if we were old and white-haired and stooping, and went wandering about, still together, but not married, lonely and broken. And I woke up feeling you can't think how dreary and sad—as if a bell had tolled in my ears as I slept; and the feeling was so strong that I put my fingers to my face to find if it was withered; and when I could not tell certainly, I got up and lit my lamp and looked in the glass; and my face, thank God! was fresh and young; but I sat on my bed and cried to think of the poor old people I had left behind in my dream."

Mabel had so fallen into the spirit of her part that she was really crying as she ended. Her tears completed Mr. Morgan's mental confusion, and he absolutely did not know whom he was addressing or where he was himself, as he cried, "No, no, Mary! Don't cry! It shall not be: it shall never be."

Lightly withdrawing her hand from his arm, she glided like a sprite from his side, and was lost in the shadows, while her whispered words still sounded in his ear, "Good-bye for thirty years!"

A moment after three notes, clear as a bird's call, sounded from the direction whither she had vanished, and Miss Rood's companion, breaking off short a remark on the excessive dryness of the weather, bowed awkwardly and also disappeared among the shadows.

When Miss Rood laid her hand on Mr. Morgan's arm to recall him to the fact that they were now alone together, he turned quickly, and his eyes swept her from head to foot, and then rested on her face with an expression of intense curiosity and a wholly new interest, as if he were tracing out a suddenly-suggested resemblance which overwhelmed him with emotion. And as he gazed his eyes began to take fire from the faded features on which they had rested so many years in mere complacent friendliness, and she instinctively averted her face. Long intimacy had made her delicately sensitive to his moods, and when he drew her arm in his and turned to walk, although he had not uttered a word, she trembled with agitation.

"Mary, we have had an extraordinary experience to-night," he said. The old dreaminess in his voice, as of one narcotized or in a trance, sometimes a little forced, as of one trying to dream, to which she had become accustomed, and of which in her heart of hearts she was very weary, was gone. In its place she recognized a resonance which still further confused her with a sense of altered relations. His polarity had changed: his electricity was no longer negative, but positive.

Her feminine instinct vaguely alarmed, she replied, "Yes, indeed, but it is getting late. Hadn't we better go in?" What lent the unusual intonation of timidity to her voice? Certainly nothing that she could have explained.

"Not quite yet, Mary," he answered, turning his gaze once more fully upon her.

Her eyes dropped before his, and a moment after fluttered up to find an explanation for their behavior, only to fall again in blind panic. For, mingling unmistakably with the curiosity with which he was still studying her features, was a new-born expression of appropriation and passionate complacency. Her senses whirled in a bewilderment that had a suffocating sweetness about it. Though she now kept her eyes on the ground, she felt his constant sidewise glances, and, desperately seeking relief from the conscious silence that enveloped them like a vapor of intoxicating fumes, she forced herself to utter the merest triviality she could summon to her lips: "See that house." The husky tones betrayed more agitation than the ruse concealed.

He answered as irrelevantly as she had spoken, "Yes, indeed, so it is." That was their only attempt at conversation.

For a half hour—it might have been much more or much less—they walked in this way, thrilling with the new magnetism that at once attracted and estranged them with an extraordinary sense of strangeness in familiarity. At length they paused under the little porch of Miss Rood's cottage, where he commonly bade her good-evening after their walks. The timidity and vague alarms that had paralyzed her while they were walking disappeared as he was about to leave her, and she involuntarily returned his unusual pressure of her hand.

A long time after behold her still encircled in his arms, not blushing, but pale and her eyes full of a soft astonished glow! "Oh, Robert!" was all she had said after one first little gasp.

They never met George or Mabel again. Mrs. Morgan learned subsequently that two young people from the city answering their description had been guests at the opposite house, and had left Plainfield the morning after the events hereinbefore set forth, and drew her conclusions accordingly. But her husband preferred to cherish the secret belief that his theory that memories might become visible had proved true in one instance at least.

Edward Bellamy.

BRANDYWINE, 1777.

As the Friends sat in the shop, hats on heads, the elders and overseers "facing the meeting," women on one side, men on the other, all on hastily-arranged benches of wheelwright planks, their silent serenity must have been inwardly disturbed, for the spiritual ear surely heard wild voices of conflict in the air. The shock of a near battle was impending; the very tread of the advancing invaders could almost be heard; already, indeed, as the Friends gathered in meeting, the fighting had begun six miles down the creek, near the ford at John and Amos Chad's.

On the preceding 20th of July—a Sunday—General David Forman, who had been patiently watching from the shores of New York Bay the embarkation of the British army upon the fleet of Lord Howe, and anxiously wondering from day to day whither the armada, with its eighteen thousand soldiers, would sail, observed an increased activity amongst the ships. One hundred and sixty sail lay inside of Sandy Hook. Next morning fifteen more came down from the city, and in the afternoon yet eighty more—mostly small brigs, schooners and sloops—came out of the Narrows and joined the fleet, so that it numbered two hundred and fifty-five sail.

On Wednesday the wind favored their departure. At half-past six in the morning the admiral's signal-gun was fired, and at seven they began to get under way. All day the vigilant Forman watched them as they passed out of the bay and moved down the Jersey coast. In three divisions they stretched away, steering mostly south-east, and moving like an immense flock of white waterfowl over the placid summer seas. He riding on shore as they sailed on the water, night found him at Shrewsbury, and thence, with all speed, he sent couriers to General Washington and to the Executive Council of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. The council, in whose archives we find his despatch, at once sent another scout, Captain John Hunn, to the Jersey coast to watch the hostile fleet. Setting off promptly, Hunn had reached the shore, near Little Egg Harbor, by two o'clock of Friday, the 25th, and thence he rode slowly down to Cape May, not seeing any of the ships, however, until the 30th, when, after three days of "thick" weather, some of them came into the view of observers on both capes of the Delaware. From the Delaware side, at ten in the morning, that truculent Sussex Whig, Henry Fisher, had discerned two hundred and twenty-eight sail, and he sent off an express to ride with might and main, up the forest roads by Dover and Cantwell's Bridge, to Wilmington, and so to Philadelphia. Leaving the cape at ten in the morning, the messenger reached Chester at a quarter before six in the afternoon, and thence hurried on.

Hunn, too, saw the ships from his post on Cape May, and only the need of being brief is reason for not giving here his quaint and badly-spelled despatches, which, however, in spite of imperfect orthography, sufficiently told the movements of the fleet.

July 31st the ships were still in the offing, but the next day not one could be seen from the Delaware capes. Howe had sailed away for the ampler waters of the Chesapeake, though the change of plan involved further delay on shipboard and exposure to the dangers of a greatly lengthened voyage. August 7th his ships were seen beating down the coast toward Cape Charles, but, encountering adverse winds, it was some ten days later before they were heard of inside the great bay.

Washington had already moved from New Jersey, and on the 24th of August he set forth from Philadelphia, riding at the head of his troops, who, as they marched through the streets, were decorated with sprays of green and watched by great crowds. With him rode the marquis de la Fayette, and other foreign officers of renown accompanied the march—Pulaski, the gallant Pole, the marquis de la Rouerie, and Louis de Fleury, a young and spirited compatriot of La Fayette, on duty with Stirling's division.

Part of the army, including the division of General Stephen, had preceded the commander's march to Chester, and at that place General Armstrong had been for some days gathering the Pennsylvania militia. There moved with Washington the remaining divisions of the army under Sullivan, Stirling, Wayne and Greene, the artillery alone excepted. This, General Nash was to place upon flatboats at Philadelphia, and so float down to Chester.

By the 26th the whole army was in and about Wilmington, then only a modest town, the larger part gathered on one side along the Christiana, and the other clustered about the great mills upon the Brandywine, whose corn-meal gave the place its chief repute. Washington fixed his head-quarters in the mansion of one of the mill-owners (presumably Joseph Tatnall's spacious house), and the troops occupied the hills around, on which some traces of their lines of defence may still be discovered. The Delaware militia, urgently called upon by Congress, had been aroused, as far as possible, by the ever-faithful Rodney, the Signer of the Declaration—that tall, thin, odd-looking man, with a green patch covering the cancer that consumed his face—and they had taken the field under the command of General Thomas Collins of Belmont Hall in Kent, recently sheriff of that county, and afterward governor of the State. Part of their duty had been an attempt to save from the enemy's hands the stores, including a large quantity of that precious article, salt, which had been gathered at the "Head of Elk."

The British had arrived. Their enormous fleet, proceeding slowly, had kept well together, and now lay anchored in Elk River, the greatest company by far that these quiet estuaries, the home of the wildfowl, fish and crab, had ever seen; and on the 25th the debarkation of the troops began, Cornwallis's command landing first, and Knyphausen's, local chronicles say, not coming ashore until the 31st of the month. The long voyage had been especially trying to the horses: those that survived were almost starved, and in no condition either to carry dragoons or drag cannon. General Howe issued a proclamation to the people declaring that he came only to punish the rebellious, and making all due assurances to those disposed to maintain the royal authority. They were informed they would be paid in gold and silver for all the horses, cattle and produce they would bring in, and the Tories, we are told, thereupon drove in some of the stock of their Whig neighbors. Knyphausen's men destroyed the county buildings of Cecil at Court-house Point, and the public records were carried away, most of them being subsequently recovered in New York. Several thousand bushels of oats and corn were amongst the stores captured.

Heavy rains fell on the 26th, the day after the debarkation began, and no forward movement of importance was made until the 27th, when Cornwallis marched to Elkton (the Head of Elk), and thence issued the proclamation referred to. The next day his advance-guard occupied Gray's Hill, two miles to the east.

The two armies therefore confronted each other at a distance of some fifteen to eighteen miles, and the unhappy people between sustained the usual penalties of such a situation. The American "light-horse," part of which was the famous command of Harry Lee, scoured the country, annoying the British outposts and capturing numbers of prisoners. On the 28th they secured thirty or forty, and the next day twenty-nine were reported, besides twenty deserters who had come in, eight of them from the fleet. General Collins, with his Delaware militia, hung upon the right flank of the British, commanded by Knyphausen, and preserved the lower section of New Castle county from being despoiled. Numerous skirmishes occurred, and amongst them one which, upon the scale of other Revolutionary encounters, almost rises to the dignity of a battle. Should we call it by that name, it was the only battle ever fought in Delaware during the struggle, unless we except some bloody local fights between the Whigs and the Tories of Sussex. This affair took place on the 3d of September. The British were then advancing slowly eastward, and their vanguard, composed of German yagers, supported by light infantry, encountered at Cooch's Bridge, a crossing of the White Clay Creek, the riflemen of Maxwell and some of the Delaware militia. Maxwell's men, posted thinly and under cover, poured a deadly fire into the British ranks as they advanced, but were presently forced back by their superior numbers across the stream. The Americans admitted a loss of forty killed and wounded, and while the casualties on the other side were not known, a woman who came the next day from the British camp declared she had seen nine wagonloads of wounded brought in.

Meanwhile, the American commanders had been choosing a position in which to meet the advance of the enemy. During the rains of the 26th, Washington himself rode down nearly to the British front, and Greene and Weeden, reconnoitring carefully, had selected the high ground of Iron Hill, near the British lines on Gray's Hill, as a strong position. A council of general officers, however, decided against this location, choosing instead an advance of five or six miles out of Wilmington to the east side of Red Clay Creek. To the position thus chosen on September 5th the whole army moved, except a brigade under General Irwin, which was left to occupy the defensive works around Wilmington. On the Red Clay the line extended from near the confluence of that stream with the Christiana on the left up to Hockessin on the right. Greene disapproved altogether of the position. He pointed out that it did not cover Philadelphia, and that it would be easily turned by the march of Howe northward into Pennsylvania—exactly what subsequently occurred.

Three days after the line of the Red Clay had been occupied, the British, having bought and seized horses enough to serve their pressing needs, began their forward movement. Their tents and heavy baggage, the last to be disembarked, had now been landed, and the rear, under General Grant, was ready to follow the onward march. On the 8th, therefore, Cornwallis extended his left flank well up into the country above Newark, far outreaching the American lines, while a strong column of the right wing threatened the American front, moving directly toward it as far as Milltown, only two miles away. This manœuvre developed the untenable character of the Red Clay line, and Washington hastened to extricate himself. On the night of the 8th he broke camp and marched rapidly northward. At two o'clock on the morning of the 9th he crossed the Brandywine at Chad's Ford, and posted his army on the high hill-slopes east of the creek, directly in Howe's path toward Philadelphia. The British commander, disappointed and chagrined when he perceived at daylight the escape of the Americans, moved also, and on the evening of September 10th united his two columns at Kennet Square, directly west some seven miles, by a well-used road, from Washington's position.

The Brandywine Valley, near the battle-ground, then, as now, teemed with agricultural wealth. The fine farms of the thrifty English settlers, many of whom traced their ownership back in a family line of three-quarters of a century, spread out along the creek in fine meadows of natural "green grass," and rolled upward over the hill-slopes, which, though broken and irregular, nowhere rise precipitously or to great height. The invading forces, as they marched up from the Chesapeake, could not but see the richness of the region, and one of their officers, conversed with by Joseph Townsend, exclaimed "in some rapture," Joseph says, "You have got a hell of a fine country here; which we have found to be the case ever since we landed at the Head of Elk."

Along the hill-slopes, on the east side of the Brandywine, from Chad's Ford up to Brinton's, a distance of about three miles, the Americans lay on the night of September 10th. Wayne was posted to guard the lower ford, and Sullivan had his own division and those of Stirling and Stephen stretched up along the stream. Greene's division formed the reserve. Sullivan's duties included the guarding of the fords above Brinton's, and he had become possessed of the unfortunate idea that there were but three of these fordable, and that beyond the three in question there was no place for a distance of twelve miles where the hostile army could cross. He therefore sent detachments on this evening of the 10th to the three fords—the Delaware regiment to Jones's, and battalions of Hazen's regiment to Wistar's and Buffington's. With this he rested content. It is, however, true that the cavalry at his command seems to have been pitifully meagre: he asserts that on the morning of the battle he had four light-horsemen only, two of whom he sent on scouting duty, retaining the other two to serve as couriers to head-quarters.

Below the line of Washington's main army, at Pyle's Ford, were posted the Pennsylvania militia under General Armstrong, and below their position the Brandywine enters rocky hills, flowing between steep banks that forbid the easy passage of an army.

Washington slept on this night at Benjamin Ring's, just east of Chad's Ford, and La Fayette at Gideon Gilpin's, near by. Both the dwellings are still standing and occupied as places of residence. To defend the crossing at the ford a battery of six guns was planted in front of John Chad's house. Its location may yet be distinctly traced. West of the stream, Maxwell's riflemen were posted well out on the road toward Kennet Square, where General Howe occupied Wiley's tavern, an ancient hostelry, as his quarters. He had formed his plan of attack—to engage the attention of the Americans by a sharp attack on the road to the crossing at Chad's with Knyphausen's division of five thousand men, while Cornwallis should proceed, upon roads concealed from the American view by distance and intervening forests, far up the creek to the fords that Sullivan had not guarded, and, crossing there, descend with crushing force upon the American line. Sullivan himself declared, in letters written after the battle, that he had anticipated such an attack: it was the natural plan of battle for Howe to adopt under the circumstances. If, then, our general had only taken sufficient precaution to meet it!

Early on this foggy, warm morning of the 11th the British were in motion. There was no hurry for Knyphausen, but Cornwallis's men had a long, hard march before them. At five o'clock they set off, leaving behind them all encumbering baggage, even their knapsacks. Turning northward, they took the road which, pursuing a direction generally parallel with the Brandywine, reaches the west branch of the creek at Trimble's Ford. Howe himself rode with them. He was mounted, Townsend says, "on a large English horse, much reduced in flesh"—thanks to short rations on shipboard. Thirteen thousand men, the whole left wing of the army, marched in this column. Hidden by the forests and hills, as well as by the mists of the morning, they had moved several miles on their way before any word of their march reached the Americans across the creek, only three miles away.

Cornwallis having gone, Knyphausen presently took up his share of the morning's work. At nine o'clock, or thereabout, he pressed forward on the road toward Chad's. The opposing force between him and that place was mainly Maxwell's command of riflemen and light infantry, whose main body, about a thousand strong, lay upon the high ground a mile west of the ford, but whose scouting-parties the British advance-guard speedily encountered. A party of scouts, indeed, tradition says, had ventured to Johnny Welsh's tavern, almost in the very embraces of Knyphausen, and there, in cheerful disregard of precaution, had tied their horses in front, and were making merry with the apple whiskey and New England rum of the bar-room. Surprised thus, the patriot bacchanals ran for their lives from the back door and escaped through the fields, emptying their guns in one sputtering volley that wounded one of their own horses left in the hands of the enemy.

A little farther, however, the riflemen began to fire upon the advancing British, though, pressed by the heavy column, they fell slowly back toward Maxwell's main body. From behind the clumps of trees, the hedges, the walls and the houses they aimed at the invaders, and harassed, if they did not impede, their march. The "Old Kennet" meeting-house and its graveyard walls gave them another and yet more favorable ambush. But by ten o'clock the fighting had become more serious. Maxwell, pressed by a greatly superior force, resisted stoutly, and the firing on both sides was heavy. Proctor's artillery pounded away across the stream. The riflemen, well under cover, at first threw Knyphausen's men into confusion, though they included some of the best regiments of the British army, the Fourth, Fifth, Twenty-eighth, Forty-ninth and Seventy-first being among them.

As Proctor trained his guns upon the advancing British, the house of William Harvey (Senior—his son William, Junior, lived east of the creek) was directly in the line of fire. William, who was a quiet but firm old Friend, was at his home, intending to protect his goods if possible, though he had sent his family away. His neighbor, Jacob Way, found him at this juncture sitting on his front piazza, which ended to the eastward against his kitchen, a semi-detached building. "Come away!" said Jacob: "thee is in danger here. Thee will surely be killed." But William refused. Jacob expostulated. As they exchanged words, a twelve-pound cannon-ball came from Proctor's battery directly for the house, passed through both walls of the kitchen, and plunged along the piazza floor, tearing up the boards and barely avoiding William's legs, until, a little farther on, it buried itself six feet deep in the earth. It is recorded that William hesitated no longer, but sought a safer place. His house was thoroughly despoiled when the British came up.

Knyphausen, however, steadily pressed the Americans back, forced them from the high ground down to the edge of the creek, and finally drove them across. By half-past ten o'clock this was accomplished, and the British line was then formed half a mile back from the stream, where it lay until half-past four in the afternoon, the artillery keeping up a threatening but not serious fire upon Wayne's position on the east side, which his batteries returned. On the whole, the Americans thought themselves doing fairly well. Washington's secretary sent off a despatch to Congress saying that the British loss must be three hundred killed and wounded, "while ours does not exceed fifty altogether."

Part of the British force at the ford on this morning was a rifle corps commanded by Major Patrick Ferguson, a young Scotchman recently arrived in America, and subsequently killed in the sanguinary fight on King's Mountain. In a letter describing the Brandywine battle he says his men were lying concealed in a skirt of woods when "a rebel officer in a huzzar dress" passed in front, followed by another in dark green and blue "mounted on a good bay horse and wearing a remarkably high cocked hat." Ferguson ordered three men to steal near and fire upon them, but believing that they would surely be killed, so near were they riding, he felt the act to be murder and recalled his men. Again, having first passed to some distance, the officer on the bay horse returned, and rode within easy shooting distance, but Ferguson again restrained himself. The next day he learned from wounded Americans who fell into the hands of the British "that General Washington was all the morning with the light troops, and attended only by a French officer in a huzzar dress, he himself mounted and dressed in every respect as above described."

The Friends whom we left gathered in the wheelwright-shop adjourned with some agitation. "While we were sitting therein," Joseph Townsend says, "some disturbance was discovered near the house and about the door, which occasioned some individuals to go out to know the cause, and they not returning and the uneasiness not subsiding, suspicions arose that something serious was taking place: the meeting accordingly closed."

It was indeed quite time that the heads of the meeting had shaken hands as the signal for adjourning. The "uneasiness" outside had good reason. The cry was that the red-coats were coming. Women were weeping and crying that "they murdered all before them, young and old." The men endeavored to allay their fears, and urged them to be more composed; but while this took place "our eyes were caught, on a sudden, by the appearance of the army coming out of the woods into the fields belonging to Emmor Jefferis, on the west side of the creek, above the fording-place. In a few minutes the fields were literally covered over with them, and they were hastening toward us. Their arms and bayonets, being raised, shone bright as silver, there being a clear sky and the day exceedingly warm."

Howe and Cornwallis, making their long détour, since five in the morning had crossed the western branch at Trimble's Ford, and were here now, at the undefended crossing of the eastern branch, ready to sweep down upon the American line. Emmor Jefferis, who lived at the ford in a substantial house, was surprised at such an arrival of visitors. There lay in his ample cellar great store of wines and other liquors, silks, cloths, etc., the most valuable goods of some of the merchants down at Wilmington, which they had hauled up to this point when they considered their own town threatened. As the British pressed their company upon Emmor with great unreserve, they speedily found the prize in the cellar. The casks were rolled out, the heads knocked in, and the officers, quaffing the old madeira, drank to its rebel owners, whose chagrin may be imagined when they heard of its fate.

To cross the creek, General Howe ordered Jefferis to act as guide and further to direct them down the roads toward the American position. Emmor obeyed with great hesitancy, and later, when the battle was on and a bullet flew uncomfortably near, he flinched so perceptibly that Howe felt called on to say, "Don't be afraid, Mr. Jefferis: they won't hurt you." Notwithstanding which assurance, Emmor still was not happy.

The hour of crossing must have been near noon or a little after. They turned down the road toward Birmingham as they reached the east side, and soon the head of the column passed through Sconnel's, by the meeting-house so lately vacated. "The space occupied by the main body and flanking-parties was near a half mile wide." Sarah Boake, the wife of Abel, whose house stood near, called to Joseph Townsend and his brother William—who since meeting closed had gone home to secure their horses in the stable, but had now returned—to see what fine fellows these were. "They're something like an army!" cried she. As the column passed "one of the most eligible houses" in the little cluster at Sconnel, "divers of the principal officers" entered and soon "manifested an uncommon social disposition," being full of inquiries where the rebels now were, and especially where Mr. Washington was to be found. To this William Townsend answered that he thought if they would have patience they would presently meet with Mr. Washington, as he and his men were not far distant—a dry joke that does great credit, under the circumstances, to Quaker William. Moreover, as they plied the young men with further inquiries, William said he had seen the commander down at his quarters at Chad's the day before, and described him as "a stately, well-proportioned, fine-looking man, of great ability, active, firm and resolute, of a social disposition, and considered to be a good man." This was observed, Joseph says, "to check their ardor for a sight of him," though one rejoined that "he might be a good man, but he was most damnably misled to take up arms against his sovereign." As they sat thus talking, Cornwallis passed the house. He appeared tall and sat very erect, wearing his scarlet uniform, richly trimmed with gold lace and heavy epaulets. Most of the officers, our narrator says, "were rather short, portly men, well dressed and of genteel appearance, and did not look as if they had ever been exposed to any hardship, their skins being as white and delicate as is customary for females brought up in large cities or towns." A halt of the advance-guard had been made a few minutes in the village while the horses were fed on some patches of growing corn. These troops were Germans, "and many of them," Townsend remarks, "wore their beards on their upper lips, which was a novelty in that part of the country."

By two o'clock, or somewhat earlier, the British had reached Osborne's Hill, from which they had a good view to the south and east. The high ground around Birmingham meeting-house, on which a little later the hurrying Americans would appear, was plainly in view. Cornwallis's men had now marched since morning about thirteen miles under the burning sun, wading the two branches of the Brandywine. They were halted here, took out their dinner-rations and ate them, and about three o'clock were rested and ready to fight.

All the fore part of the day Washington had been near the crossing at Chad's, watching the encounter there. It must have been nearly noon when he received intelligence of a startling character. Colonel Bland had been across the creek (the main stream below its "forks"), and now sent word that he had observed at a distance the march north of a large body of the enemy. Two brigades he had distinctly seen, "and the dust appeared to rise in their rear for a considerable distance." While this despatch was in Washington's hand came another from Colonel Ross, who had ridden to a point on "the Great Valley road," in the rear of Howe's column, and sent word confirming Bland's observations. He estimated the moving force at not less than five thousand.

With such intelligence of Howe's strategy, Washington promptly resolved upon a bold and vigorous counter-movement—not hastily, we may presume, for he had doubtless anticipated the contingency and formed the plan in anticipation of such an attempt to outflank him. He now gave orders to his division commanders—Sullivan on the right, Greene in the centre and Wayne on the left—to prepare for an immediate offensive movement against Knyphausen, designing to cross the creek, crush him and capture his baggage before Howe could counter-march and come to his relief. Sullivan says he received orders to cross and attack the enemy's left, while the rest of the army crossed below (at Chad's) and engaged his right. "This I was preparing to do when Major Spear, a militia officer, rode hastily in. He informed me that he was from the upper country, that he had come in the road where the enemy must have passed to attack our right, and that there was not the least appearance of them in that quarter." He added that he had been sent to reconnoitre by General Washington. Sullivan now hesitated: he could not omit to forward such intelligence. It contradicted certainly what Colonel Bland and Colonel Ross had sent, but it was possible that Cornwallis had moved northward only as a feint, and had returned to the support of Knyphausen; so that if the Americans should now cross, they would encounter not merely the British right, but their whole army—not five thousand men, but eighteen thousand. Sullivan therefore sat down, took Spear's statement word for word "from his own mouth," and forwarded it to Washington, sending Spear himself after the messenger to report verbally. "I made no comment and gave no opinion," says Sullivan. Upon the heels of Spear came another keen-eyed scout who had not seen the British. This was "Sergeant Tucker of the Light Horse." He confirmed Spear's story. Washington now recalled his orders and abandoned the intended attack on Knyphausen.

On the hill-slope south of the present road which crosses the Brandywine at Chad's, Washington was resting under the shade of a cherry tree (which fell in a storm a few years ago), when, about half-past one o'clock, there came riding across the hillside fields from above, avoiding the circuitous roads, Squire Thomas Cheyney, his hat gone, his black hair streaming in the wind and his black eyes blazing with excitement. The blooded mare he rode, trained to fox-hunting, carried his two hundred pounds easily, and cleared ditches, fences and hedges. Cheyney had been near the upper fords, and had suddenly come upon the British as they moved down toward Osborne's Hill. They fired upon him as he wheeled and galloped off, but he escaped unhurt. Reporting to Sullivan, that officer received him discourteously, the chroniclers say; as not improbably he might, for the contradictory reports as to the British movement were, upon a subject so terribly momentous, exasperating enough. But as Sullivan hesitated, Cheyney demanded to see Washington himself, and was accordingly sent to him. Washington ordered him to dismount. "Now," said he, "draw me a sketch of the upper roads. Where did the British cross? and where are they now?"

Cheyney alighted and made the plan. Washington seemed to hesitate, as if doubting the information. The ardent squire, in the intensity of the moment, cried, "Take my life, general, if I deceive you!"

If the commander doubted, however, there came on the instant further word. Colonel Bland had sent another despatch to Sullivan, dated at "a quarter-past one o'clock," and saying that the enemy were then arriving in great force on Osborne's Hill, a little to the right of Birmingham meeting-house. This despatch Sullivan sent instantly to Washington, and the word Cheyney had brought was now made sure beyond peradventure.

Bland's confirmation of Cheyney's news aroused the injudicious but brave commander of the right wing, and he moved his troops at once up toward Birmingham. His immediate command, he says in one of the several defensive letters written after the battle, marched a mile from the position it occupied to that in which it met the enemy. On a hill just west of the meeting-house, from which, as they looked north-west, they could see the British on Osborne's Hill, they made their line of battle, and Cornwallis, as he sat upon his horse watching them through his glass, cried out with a round army oath, "The damned rebels form well!"

In what order the American line was formed we know. The division of Stephen occupied the right, that of Stirling the centre, that of Sullivan the left. But many of the details are vaguely and contradictorily stated. Lossing, following the sketch of the battle in the Pennsylvania Historical Society's collections, describes Sullivan's circuitous march to outreach Deborre, both seeking to obtain the right of the line, while Bancroft says that Sullivan posted his division in advance of the extreme left, detached by a half-mile gap from the rest of the line, but that, on being remonstrated with, he moved to close up the space, and was attacked before he had again formed his line of battle. What followed, however, is distinct enough. Rested and fed, the royal army precipitated itself, three to one in strength, and equally disproportionate in discipline and experience, upon the unready line of the Americans. The German and British troops, we are told, "vied with each other in fury" as they ran forward in a superb and irresistible bayonet charge. The struggle began about four o'clock: it lasted perhaps half an hour. As the enemy advanced they were fired upon by a body of outposted riflemen in an orchard near the road on which the attacking column moved; whereupon, says Joseph Townsend, who was near by watching the movement, the Hessians ran up the bank by the roadside, and, levelling their guns through the fence, returned the fire.

Overwhelmed by the attack, the Americans broke on the right. This was the post of honor which Deborre, an old French officer, had obtained for his brigade. Conway, in a letter written a few weeks later to support Sullivan's defence, says the latter, though entitled to the right, took the left in order to save time, and that Deborre, though the ground was much more favorable for the quick formation of his line, was not in order when the enemy attacked. It is agreed that Deborre's brigade broke first, and that then the left, Sullivan's men, gave way, though Sullivan struggled bravely to hold them. "I saw him," says De Fleury, "rallying his men with great ardor," but unsuccessfully; and he then came to Stirling's division, which was fighting on the hill, braving the thick of the fire until the centre too gave way, when, at the last, he was striving to rally the fugitives and encourage them to form a new line behind the fences. Had Sullivan shown vigilance and discretion equal to his courage, the day's history might have been totally different.

Thirty minutes completed this epoch of the battle. The first line was destroyed. Those who had formed it were stretched on the sere pastures or hurrying to the rear. Stirling and Conway, as well as Sullivan, had shown great bravery and coolness, but the resistance, practically, had been totally ineffective. The beaten and demoralized troops streamed into the woods, and sought shelter or escape until they met the reinforcements under Greene.

As the sound of Sullivan's encounter reached him—possibly sooner—Greene had moved from his reserve position to the support of the right flank. He marched, it is asserted, four miles in forty minutes. Washington himself left Chad's Ford, giving the command there to Wayne, and hurried off to the more perilous quarter of the field. Joseph Brown, a resident of the vicinity, was impressed as a guide. He was hurriedly mounted on a fine charger belonging to a staff officer, and Washington bade him ride with all speed in the direction of the firing. Away they went, Joseph's horse clearing fences and ditches gallantly, the commander at his flank urging him on. "Push along, old man! push along, old man!" was his repeated command, remembered and related for many years after by Joseph. They rode, he said, to a point between Dilworthtown and the meeting-house, half a mile away from the former place, and here the sounds of the battle seemed close at hand. Bullets flew thick, the general and his staff turned their attention from the guide, and he, glad to be excused, slipped from his saddle and withdrew.

Precisely when and where Greene met the fugitives from the first rout is another of the uncertainties. The best descriptions of the battle, upon being compared carefully, will be found vague and to some degree conflicting. But there are two points on the road from the meeting-house to Dilworth, marked upon the military map of the field as the "Second Position," where Greene undoubtedly posted his men. These positions are near together: one is south of the road, half a mile east of the meeting-house, on a hill-slope descending toward the west; and the other is north of the road, at a ravine now known as Sandy Hollow.

It is said that Greene opened his lines, received the fugitives from the front, and re-formed. Possibly this took place at this second position. It is certain that here the British advance was sharply checked, and the Americans stubbornly held their ground until late in the afternoon. It was at this turn in the battle that La Fayette was wounded, and not in the first encounter, as the current historical narrative would give us to understand. A survey of the map ascertains very precisely the place where he was shot, according to abundant testimony, and this is more than a mile distant from Sullivan's lines. It is very unlikely that La Fayette was in the first encounter, beyond the meeting-house. He probably arrived on the field with Washington, or he may possibly have accompanied Greene. The place where he was wounded is a field about halfway from the meeting-house to Dilworth, south-west of the road and about a hundred rods away. Trustworthy accounts say he was with Washington at the time, both engaged in rallying the troops; and this is quite likely: the place is only a little distance westward from the point to which Joseph Brown guided the general. In July, 1825, when La Fayette revisited the ground, he drove up from Wilmington in a carriage with the Messrs. Du Pont, whom he had been visiting. Great crowds accompanied him over the historic field, and as he drove along the road near the place already described, the carriage was stopped and the gallant old gentleman rose to his feet to point out the position in which he sustained his wound. "It was," he said, "somewhere on yonder slope. The exact spot I cannot now tell."[A]