continued, addressing Henry. "You have well
executed your mission. Be discreet and ready: I shall have much need of
your head and hand both: your heart is mine already, good brother."

"I will ride for you, sister," said Henry, "I will run for you, speak
for you, pray for you--if my prayers be worth anything--and strike for
you, if need be. If I am but turned of sixteen, I am a man, I trow; and
that's more than you are. Good bye! a soldier ought to look after his
horse, you know."

"God bless you, dear brother, for an excellent boy," said Mildred
smiling, "man I mean--aye and a brave one!"

Henry now walked away, and Mildred betook herself to other cares.

CHAPTER XII.

A POLITICAL RETROSPECT.--BUTLER ENTERS SOUTH CAROLINA.

It was the misfortune of South Carolina, during the revolutionary war,
to possess a numerous party less attached to the union or more tainted
with disaffection than the inhabitants of any of the other states.
Amongst her citizens the disinclination to sever from the mother country
was stronger, the spread of republican principles more limited, and the
march of revolution slower, than in either of the other colonies,
except, perhaps, in the neighbor state of Georgia, where the people
residing along the Savannah river, were so closely allied to the
Carolinians in sentiment, habits, and pursuits, as to partake pretty
accurately of the same political prejudices, and to unite themselves in
parties of the same complexion. Upon the first invasion of Georgia, at
the close of the year 1778, the city of Savannah was made an easy
conquest, and a mere handful of men, early in 1779, were enabled to
penetrate the interior as far as Augusta, and to seize upon that post.
The audacity with which Prevost threatened Charleston in the same year,
the facility of his march through South Carolina, and the safety which
attended his retreat, told a sad tale of the supineness of the people of
that province. The reduction of Charleston in the following year, by Sir
Henry Clinton, was followed with singular rapidity by the conquest of
the whole province. A civil government was erected. The most remote
posts in the mountains were at once occupied by British soldiers or
provincial troops, mustered under the officers of the royal army.
Proclamations were issued to call back the wandering sheep to the royal
fold; and they, accordingly, like herds that had been scattered from
beneath the eye of the shepherd by some ro