ts gleaming waters meet the mouth of
the creek that runs at the foot of Fairlee. A julep there is on the
table beside me, flavoured with mint gathered by the hands of John
Cotton early in the morning, while the dew was still upon it, from the
finest bank in all Kent County.

So with these old friends around me, with the julep on my right hand
and the paper before me, I sit on the great porch of Fairlee to write
of the wild days of my youth, when I first drew my sword in the Great
Cause. To write, before my hand becomes feeble and my eyes grow dim,
of the strange things that I saw and the adventures that befell me, of
the old Tory of the Braes, of the fair maid his daughter, and of the
part they played in my life during the War of the Deliverance. To
write so that those who come after me, as well as those who are
growing up around my knees, may know the part their grandfather played
in the stirring times that proclaimed the birth of a mighty nation.

The first year of the great struggle, ah, me! I was young then, and
the wild blood was in my veins. I was broad of shoulder and long of
limb, with a hand that gripped like steel and a seat in the saddle
that was the envy of all that hard-riding country. I was hardy and
skilled in all the outdoor sports and pastimes of my race and people,
and being light in the saddle I often led the hardest riders and won
from them the brush, while every creek for fifty miles up and down the
broad Chesapeake, and even the farther shore as far as Baltimore, knew
my canoe, and the High Sheriff himself was no finer shot than I.

You, who bask in the sunshine of long and dreary years of peace, who
never hear the note of the bugle nor see the flash of the foeman's
steel from one year's end to another, know not what it was to live in
those stirring times and all the joy of the strife. You should have
seen us then, when the whole land was aflame.

The fiery signal had come like a rush of the wind from the north, with
the cry of the dying on the roadsides and fields of Lexington.

All along the western shore the men of Anne Arundel, of Frederick, and
Prince George were mustering fast and strong. Then the Kentish men and
those of Queen Anne and all the lower shore were mounting fast and
mustering, while from the Howard hills came riding down bold and hardy
yeomen.

Then, and as it has always been in the old province of Maryland, the
gentlemen led the people, and everywhere the spirit of fire ra