seen a great deal of service. This young woman was named Molly Ludwig
Hays, and was the wife of a barber who had been well known in the
village. He had won her hand with difficulty for Molly was a belle
throughout the countryside. She was not only handsome, but as strong as
a man, able to carry a heavy meal-sack on her shoulder; and one of the
hardest workers that the town knew. She washed and scrubbed and scoured
and baked from morning till night, and seemed to revel in the hard work
that gave the needed exercise to her strong muscles.

Throughout her life Molly Hays had admired soldiers, and more than once
she expressed herself in no undecided terms to the effect that she
wished she were a man so that she could bear arms and wear a uniform,
and be a soldier herself.

When she was still a very young woman the American Revolution for
freedom from Great Britain broke out. All the country was aflame, and
rang with the stories of what happened at Lexington and Bunker Hill.
Man after man from the village took his powder horn and musket and went
off to enlist for the war, and Molly grew more and more restless as she
saw them go.

At last her husband came to her, somewhat sheepishly, for he disliked
to tell her the intention he had in his heart; but at length he made
her understand that just because he was married was no reason why he
should remain at home with the women; and he, too, intended to enlist
that very day.

Molly consented with the utmost enthusiasm. She told him that she would
be proud to be the wife of a soldier, since she could not be one
herself, and bade him farewell with the admonishment to do his part
bravely and to bear himself like the man she knew him to be. And she
stood at the door of their home waving good-by to him with a cheerful
face that gave no hint of her aching heart.

When her husband had departed Molly returned to the Irving household
where she worked as well as she had before her marriage, trying to find
relief in the heavy labor from the pain of having lost her husband and
the aching desire to go and do her part beside him even though she were
a woman. Fate, thought Molly, had made a sad mistake, in making her a
woman, for she knew that in spite of her petticoats she could soldier
as well as the men,--and if she had only been a man she believed she
could have risen to an important position in the army.

The tide of the struggle wavered and battles with the red coats were
fought and w