ved by their entreaties. He only saw the young maiden's
pale, sweet face and appealing blue eyes, and he set off with the two
through the storm, which beat about them so that they were quite wet to
the skin when the house of widow Stevens was reached. The man and the
maid were given beds and dry clothing.

Next morning, Charles asked the stranger:

"Are you not the man who came here in 1684, wounded?"

"I am not. I was never here before. What is your name?"

"Charles Stevens."

"Have you relatives in Boston?"

"Yes, my grandfather, Mathew Stevens, who was a Spaniard by birth and
called Mattheo Estevan, died in Boston twenty years ago, and I have
uncles, aunts and cousins living there."

"Have you relatives in Virginia?"

"I have cousins."

"Is one Robert Stevens?"

"He is."

"I know him, he befriended me and sent me here."

Then the stranger told how he had been an indented slave in Virginia,
and escaped from a cruel master through the aid of Robert Stevens.

The strangers were George Waters and his daughter Cora.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CHARTER OAK.

When time, who steals our years away
Shall steal our pleasures too,
The memory of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew.
--Moore.

The Stevens family was growing with the colonies. Of the descendants of
Mathew Stevens who came to New Plymouth in the _Mayflower_, there were
many living in Boston, New York, Salem, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The family, widely scattered as its members were, never lost track of
each other. They knew all their relatives in Virginia, Maryland and
Carolinia.

Charles Stevens, but a youth, was on a visit to Connecticut, when an
event transpired, which has since become historical. An aunt of Charles
Stevens was the wife of a certain Captain Wadsworth, and Charles was
visiting at this aunt's house when the incident happened.

As the student of American history doubtless knows, the tyrannical
Governor Andros of New York, claimed dominion over all that scope of
country denominated as the New Netherland, a very indefinite term
applied to a great scope of country extending from Maryland to the
Connecticut River, to which point Andros claimed jurisdiction.

As early as 1675, he went to the mouth of the Connecticut River with a
small naval force, to assert his authority. Captain Bull, the commander
of a small garrison at Saybrook, permitted him to land; but when the
governor