glorious moon shining
down flooding everything with its silvery light, weird and fantastic,
glinting now like polished steel upon the waters, now deepening the
shadows of the forest, or flooding again with its glorious radiance
some wide and sweeping stretch of water. And then, the unearthly
silence of it all, the mournful howl of the wolf in the hills, and the
piercing shrill cry of the wildcat, like that of a child tortured by
the demons of hell; then the horror of its beauty, its stillness and
its loneliness, comes over you; nervous chills become distinctly
apparent, and you put spurs to your horse and ride on more rapidly,
and the night is broken first by your whistle and then by your song.
So it was, as I rode by the banks of the Elk, that night in early
August, and my voice rang across the waters, as I sang the old
Highland ballad:

The Gordons cam', and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady,
And aye the word among them a'
Was, Gordons, keep you ready.

A ballad that I heard a young girl sing one day not long before. Thus
the length of my ride passed quickly away until Toby felt the soft
grass under his feet as I rode silently across the lawn. Her window
was high, it is true, but it was open to admit the fresh, cool breeze
from the bay, and then I had not thrown quoits in my youth not to be
able to surmount so small a difficulty. So I fastened a black cockade
amid the blood-red of the roses, and, rising in my stirrups, threw
them firmly and gently, and saw them rise in the air, top the
window-sill, and fall with a slight thud upon the floor. I did not
wait for more, but turned and rode away; but it seemed to me that as I
gained the shadow of the forest and looked back I saw the faint
suggestion of a girlish form standing at the open window. I looked
once again and rode on.

When morning came, I bade good-bye to my mother, mounted my black colt
Toby, and rode away to join the Maryland Line, which was marching now
from Boston, to meet the British before New York. As that day I
crossed the line into the province of Delaware, I saw nailed to a
great oak the proclamation of the Committee of Public Safety,
denouncing Charles Gordon as a Tory and a traitor, and calling upon
all persons to have no dealings with him, either in public or private,
at their peril. And thus it was at every cross-roads in the county of
Cecil, and in all the counties to the south and west, the edict had
gone forth