er snaked along the stout sedge, making it sway and bend as
though the wind were sweeping its tops.

When within the queer infolding, boy, cow, and calf had disappeared,
Anna called: "I'll run now and keep watch and tell you when the
soldiers are gone."

"No, _you won't_!" shrieked back her brother; "you'll stay _here_, and
help me, or the skeeters will kill the critters. Bring me the biggest
bush you can find, and fetch one for yourself."

Anna always obeyed Valentine. It was a way she had. He liked it, and,
generally speaking, she didn't greatly dislike it, but her dress was
thinner than his coat, and the happy mosquitoes knew she was fairer
and sweeter than her Dutch brother, and didn't mind telling her so in
the most insinuating fashion possible. On this occasion, as she had in
so many other unlike instances, she acceded to his request; toiling
backward up the ascent and fetching thence an armful of the stoutest
boughs she could twist from branches.

She neared the marsh on her return. All that she could discern was a
straw hat bobbing hither and thither; the horns of a cow tossing to
and fro; the tail of a cow lashing the air.

A voice she heard, shouting forth in impatient bursts of sound, "Anna,
Anna Kull!"

"_Here!_ I'm coming," she responded.

"Hurry up! I'm eaten alive. Snow's crazy and Sleet's a lunatic,"
shouted her brother, jerking the words forth between the vain dives
his hand made into the cloud of wings in the air.

"Sakes alive!" said poor Anna, toiling from sedge bog to sedge bog
with her burden of "bushes" and striving to hide her face from the
mosquitoes as she went.

It was nearly noon-day then, and the Fourth of July too, but neither
Valentine nor Anna thought of the day of the month. Why should they?
The Nation wasn't born yet whose hundredth birthday we keep this
year.

The solemn assembly of earnest men--debating the to be or not to be of
the United States--was over there at work in Congress Hall in the old
State House. They were heated with sun and brick and argument; a
hundred and ten British ships of war were anchoring and at anchor over
on the ocean side of Staten Island. Up the bay, seven or eight
thousand troops in "ragged regimentals" were working to make ready for
battle; but not one of them all suffered more from sun and toil and
anxiety and greed of blood than did the lad and the lass in the
marsh.

They fought it out, with many a sting and smart, another hour, and
the