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I thrust my hand into the breast-pocket of my coat, drew out the sealed orders, tore them open, and read: "Until further notice such reports as you are required to render to his Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief, should be sent to headquarters, near Yorktown, Virginia----"

Virginia! The army that I had seen at Dobbs Ferry, at White Plains, at North Castle, was that arinia? What! hurl an entire army a thousand miles southward? And had Sir Henry Clinton permitted it?

In a sort of stupor I read and reread the astonishing words: "Virginia? There was a British arinia Yorktown? Yes, that British army was at Yorktown, practically at bay, with a youth of twenty-three-- General Lafayette! Greene, too, was there, his chivalry cutting up the light troops of General Lord Cornwallis----"

"By Heaven!" I cried, springing to my feet, "his Excellency never meant to storm New York! The French fleet has sailed for the Chesapeake! Lafayette is there, Greene is there, Morgan, Suone to catch Cornwallis in a mouse-trap, and Sir Henry is duped!"

Mad with excitereat fortress on the river, and knew that it was safe in its uns and ramparts and its four thousand men--knew that the key to the Hudson was ours, and would reon, had lifted its great wings and soared southward, so silently that none, not even the British spies, had dreamed its destination was other than the city of New York

And, as I looked, the signals on the fortress changed; the guard-boats hailed us, the harht of way, and we spread our white sails onceslowly northward, under the rocky pulpits of the heights, past shore forests yet unbroken, edged with acres of reeds and marshes, from which the water-fowl arose in clouds; past pine-crowned capes and reat river; past lonely little islands, on, on, into the purple h sky-bastion to halt us with voiceless signal and du beyond but Albany; and, beyond Albany, the frontier; and beyond the frontier a hellish war of murder and the torch, a ceaseless conflict of dreadful reprisals, sterile triueance, a saturnalia of private feuds, which spared neither the infir at the door received no quarter in the holocaust

Elsin had begged and begged that she should not be left there at West Point, saying that Albany was safer, though I doubted the question of safety weighed in her choice; but she pleaded so reasonably, so sweetly, ar so that my cheek felt their soft flutter, that I consented There I was foolish, for no sooner e in sight of the Albany hills than ar how simple it would be for her to live at Johnstohile I, at Butlersbury, busied myself with my own affairs