. But he soon had Greene on his track, and he did not find his march
a very comfortable one.

Here I must tell you an interesting anecdote about General Greene. Once,
during his campaign, he entered a tavern at Salisbury, in North
Carolina. He was wet to the skin from a heavy rain. Steele, the
landlord, knew him and looked at him in surprise.

"Why, general, you are not alone?" he asked.

"Yes," said the general, "here I am, all alone, very tired, hungry, and
penniless."

Mrs. Steele hastened to set a smoking hot meal before the hungry
traveler. Then, while he was eating, she drew from under her apron two
bags of silver and laid them on the table before him.

"Take these, general," she said. "You need them and I can do without
them."

You may see that the women as well as the men of America did all they
could for liberty, for there were many others like Mrs. Steele.

I have told you that General Greene was one of the ablest of the
American leaders, and you have seen how he got the best of Cornwallis in
the retreat. Several times afterwards he fought with the British. He was
always defeated. His country soldiers could not face the British
veterans. But each time he managed to get as much good from the fight as
if he had won a victory, and by the end of the year the British were
shut up in Charleston and Savannah, and the South was free again.

Where was Cornwallis during this time? Greene had led him so far north
that he concluded to march on into Virginia and get the troops he would
find there, and then come back. There was fighting going on in Virginia
at this time. General Arnold, the traitor, was there, fighting against
his own people. Against him was General Lafayette, a young French
nobleman who had come to the help of the Americans.

I suppose some of you have read stories of how a wolf or some other
wild animal walked into a trap, from which it could not get out again.
Lord Cornwallis was not a wild animal, but he walked into just such a
trap after he got to Virginia. When he reached there he took command of
Arnold's troops. But he found himself not yet strong enough to face
Lafayette, so he marched to Yorktown, near the mouth of York River,
where he expected to get help by sea from New York. Yorktown was the
trap he walked into, as you will see.

France had sent a fleet and an army to help the Americans, and just then
this fleet came up from the West Indies and sailed into the Chesapeake,
shutting of