red at her usual hour to bed, intending to rise
at twelve.... There was none but the Invisible who could take cognisance
of her passion on assuming her new garb."

She slipped cautiously away, and travelled carefully to Bellingham,
where she enlisted as a Continental soldier on a three years' term. She
was mustered into the army at Worcester, under the name of Robert
Shurtleff. With about fifty other soldiers she soon arrived at West
Point, and it there fell to her lot to be in Captain Webb's company, in
Colonel Shepard's regiment, and in General Patterson's brigade.

Naturally the girl's disappearance from home had caused her friends and
her family great uneasiness. Her mother reproached herself for having
urged too constantly upon the attention of her child the suit of a man
for whom she did not care, and her lover upbraided himself for having
been too importunate in his wooing. The telephone and telegraph not
having been invented, it was necessary, in order to trace the lost girl,
to visit all the places to which Deborah might have flown. Her brother,
therefore, made an expedition one hundred miles to the eastward among
some of the family relations, and her suitor took his route to the west
of Massachusetts and across into New York State.

In the course of his search he visited, as it happened, the very place
in which Deborah's company was stationed, and saw (though he did not
recognise) his lost sweetheart. She recognised him, however, and hearing
his account to the officers of her mother's grief and anxiety, sent home
as soon as opportunity offered, the following letter:

"DEAR PARENT:--On the margin of one of those rivers which intersects and
winds itself so beautifully majestic through a vast extent of territory
of the United States is the present situation of your unworthy but
constant and affectionate daughter. I pretend not to justify or even to
palliate my clandestine elopement. In hopes of pacifying your mind,
which I am sure must be afflicted beyond measure, I write you this
scrawl. Conscious of not having thus abruptly absconded by reason of any
fancied ill treatment from you, or disaffection toward any, the thoughts
of my disobedience are truly poignant. Neither have I a plea that the
insults of man have driven me hence: and let this be your consoling
reflection--that I have not fled to offer more daring insults to them by
a proffered prostitution of that virtue which I have always been taught
to prese