the city. It is almost
impossible! Stay--I shall hear further," and then on the next, "A light
horseman has just confirmed the above intelligence! This is _charmante_!
They decamped yesterday. He (the horseman) was in Philadelphia. It is
true! They have gone! Past a doubt. I can't help forbear exclaiming to
the girls, 'Now are you sure the news is true? Now are you _sure_ they
have gone?'

"'Yes, yes, yes!' they all cry, 'and may they never, never return!'

"Dr. Gould came here to-night. Our army are about six miles off, on their
march to the Jerseys."

On the next day she adds, "The army began their march at six this
morning. Our brave, our heroic General Washington was escorted by fifty
of the Life Guards with drawn swords. Each day he acquires an addition
to his goodness."

A fine tribute, indeed, to the moving spirit of American Independence,
and with it let us close Sally Wister's journal, sure that with the
retreat of the British from Philadelphia, she will soon be able to
return to the friends from whom she has had such a long separation, and
so will have no further need to record happenings at the farm as she has
been doing so faithfully, but can presently relate them not to Debby
alone, but to the whole "Social Circle," and we may be sure from what
we know of Mistress Sally that her stories will lose no spice in the
telling.

If there are those who are reluctant to part with pretty Sally, let them
turn to the little journal and read it in its spicy entirety for
themselves, and it were well also after reading this chronicle of a girl
of the Revolution, to turn to the pages of history and paint in more
accurate detail the background of our vivid picture of Sally, for only a
short distance from the farm, across the hills of Gwynedd, the greatest
actors in the Revolutionary drama were playing their parts--Washington,
Lafayette, Wayne, Steuben, Greene, and many others--playing the hero's
part at the battle of Germantown, at the battle of Burgoyne, in the
skirmishes before Washington's encampment at Whitemarsh, suffering
silently in a winter at Valley Forge.

Turn to the pages of history for the sombre background and glance once
again at the piquant face and merry eyes of Sally Wister, half hidden
under her demure Quaker bonnet, with her snowy kerchief crossed so
smoothly over her tempestuous young heart, as she looked when soldiers
and officers fell under the charm of her bewitching personality!

COF