not here and there become blended with
the real facts. Uncle Richard's account is undoubtedly the best since
the days of Knickerbocker. "Benedict Arnold, you know, had command of
West Point, and he knew that the place was essential to the success of
the Continental cause. He plotted, as everybody knows, to turn it
over to the enemy, and in the correspondence which he carried on with
General Clinton, young Andre, Clinton's aid, did all the writing.
Things were coming to a focus, when a meeting took place between
Arnold and Clinton's representative, Andre, at the house of Joshua
Hett Smith, near Haverstraw. Andre came on the British ship "Vulture,"
which he left at Croton Point, in Haverstraw Bay. Well," so runs Uncle
Richard's story, "it took a long time to get matters settled; they
'confabbed' till after daybreak. Then Arnold started back to the post
which he had plotted to surrender. But daylight was no time for Andre
to return to the "Vulture," so he hung round waiting for night.

"During that day, some men who were working for James Horton, a farmer
on the ridge overlooking the river, who gave his men good rations of
cider, drank a little too much of the hard stuff. They felt good, and
thought it would be a fine joke to load and fire off an old disabled
cannon which lay a mile or so away on the bank. They hauled it to the
point now called Cockroft Point, propped it up, and then the spirit
of fun--and hard cider--prompted them to train the old piece on the
British ship "Vulture," lying at anchor in the Bay. The "Vulture's"
people must have overestimated the source of the fire, for the ship
dropped down the river, and Andre had to abandon the idea of returning
by that means. He crossed the river at King's Ferry, and while on his
way overland was captured at Tarrytown.

"Of course, the three brave men who refused to be bribed deserve all
the glory they ever had; if it were not for them, who knows but the
revolutionary war would have had a different ending. But they never
would have had a chance to capture Andre if it had not been for James
Horton's men warming up on hard cider. Hard cider broke the plans
of Arnold, it hung Andre, and it saved West Point." A boy misguided
Grouchy _en route_ to Waterloo. On what small hinges turn the
destinies of nations!

* * *

A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that
overhung the river, giving greater depth to the dark-gray and
purple o