pose them, ready to die for the freedom they desired and the
independence they had proclaimed; and it was only a few months ago that
the war had been virtually ended by the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at
Yorktown.

Colonel Barrington had taken an active and honorable part in the
conflict, yet in the beginning of the trouble, like many another man of
his class, he had been for peace, for arbitration, for arrangement if
possible. His fathers had been among the earliest settlers in Virginia,
representatives of an English family, whose roots stretched far back
into history. They had come to rest on this very spot of earth, had
raised their first rough wooden dwelling here, calling it Broadmead,
after the name of their home in England. Love for the old country was
still alive in Colonel Barrington, and it was only after grave
deliberation that he had drawn the sword, convinced that he drew it for
the right. Doubtless there were some in this great conflict who were
self-seeking, but this was certainly not the case with Henry Barrington.
He had much to lose, nothing personal to win which seemed to him of any
consequence. Broadmead he loved. He had been born there. In due time he
had brought home to it his beautiful young wife, daughter of a French
family in Louisiana, and until this upheaval the years had passed
happily, almost uneventfully, yet bringing with them increasing
prosperity.

The boy, dreaming dreams and stretching out toward an ideal, might well
have taken his father for model, but, while reverencing him and knowing
him to be a great and good man, his young imagination had been fired by
a different type of hero, the man whose restless and adventurous spirit
had brought him four years ago to fight as a volunteer in the cause of
freedom; who had come again only a year since and had done much to bring
about the surrender of Lord Cornwallis; the man who, only the other day,
had been publicly thanked by General Washington speaking for the nation
he had helped to found; the man who was at this moment his father's
guest--the Marquis de Lafayette. There was much of the French spirit in
the boy, inherited from his mother, and to every word the Marquis had
uttered he had listened eagerly, painting his hero in colors that were
too bright and too many, perhaps. An hour ago he had stolen out of the
house to this hummock, a favorite spot of his, to dream over all he had
heard and of the future.

His eyes were fixed upon a d