d for
more than fifty years she continued to make flags for the Government.

This is the account that has come down to us, not by tradition merely,
but by written statements of Mrs. Ross's daughters, grandchildren, and
others, to whom she often told the story. Mrs. Ross says that this
sample flag was made just before the Declaration of Independence,
although the Resolution endorsing it was not passed until June 14,
1777. This, however, would not argue to the incorrectness of the
account, for Congress had a fashion of writing with the utmost brevity
the results of its deliberations, and not putting in a word about the
discussions that must have taken place before the passing of a
resolution. Affairs of the utmost importance were on hand, and after
all it was the usefulness and convenience of the flag, rather than its
sentiment or the fact of its having congressional authority, that was
most in the minds of men, and it is not impossible that this design
was in use long before the date of its official recognition by
Congress. The one real weakness in the story is its lack of
contemporary evidence.

The significance of the new flag no one has expressed better than
Washington. "We take the star from Heaven," he said, "red from our
mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we
have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to
posterity representing liberty."

On the day of the passing of the resolution about the Stars and
Stripes, another one was passed, which read as follows:--

_Resolved_, That Captain John Paul Jones be appointed to command
the ship Ranger.

"The flag and I are twins, born the same hour," said Captain Jones.
The Ranger was launched in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and there her
captain went to take command. She had no flag, but the captain was a
favorite whereever he went, and a group of Portsmouth girls soon held
a "quilting party," but made a flag instead of a quilt. Moreover, as
silk enough of the proper colors could not be found in the stores of
Portsmouth, they made it from breadths of their best silken gowns,
red, white, and blue, the story declares. Then Jones sailed away to
see how his little Ranger would behave when she met a British
man-of-war. He soon found out, for the Ranger and the Drake met in
combat, and for the first time a British man-of-war struck her colors
to the new flag. This same little silken flag was the first to receive
a genuine