rty in my dreams--a beautiful woman she was, of heroic
stature with streaming hair and the glowing eyes of youth and she was
dressed in a long white robe held at the waist by a golden girdle. And I
thought that she touched my brow and said:

"'My son, I am sent for all the children of men and not for America
alone. You will find me in France for my task is in many lands.'

"I left the brave old fighter, Solomon, with tears in his eyes. What a
man is Solomon! Yet, God knows, he is the rank and file of Washington's
army as it stands to-day--ragged, honest, religious, heroic, half fed,
unappreciated, but true as steel and willing, if required, to give up his
comfort or his life! How may we account for such a man without the help
of God and His angels?"

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER XXIV

IN FRANCE WITH FRANKLIN

Jack shipped in the packet Mercury, of seventy tons, under Captain
Simeon Sampson, one of America's ablest naval commanders. She had been
built for rapid sailing and when, the second day out, they saw a
British frigate bearing down upon her they wore ship and easily ran
away from their enemy. Their first landing was at St. Martin on the
Isle de Rhe. They crossed the island on mules, being greeted with the
cry:

"_Voila les braves Bostones_!"

In France the word _Bostone_ meant American revolutionist. At the
ferry they embarked on a long gabbone for La Rochelle. There the young
man enjoyed his first repose on a French _lit_ built up of sundry
layers of feather beds. He declares in his diary that he felt the need
of a ladder to reach its snowy summit of white linen. He writes a
whole page on the sense of comfort and the dreamless and refreshing
sleep which he had found in that bed. The like of it he had not known
since he had been a fighting man.

In the morning he set out in a heavy vehicle of two wheels, drawn by
three horses. Its postillion in frizzed and powdered hair, under a
cocked hat, with a long queue on his back and in great boots, hooped
with iron, rode a lively little _bidet_. Such was the French
stagecoach of those days, its running gear having been planned with an
eye to economy, since vehicles were taxed according to the number of
their wheels. The diary informs one that when the traveler stopped for
food at an inn, he was expected to furnish his own knife. The highways
were patrolled, night and day, by armed horsemen and robberies were
unknown. The vineyards were not walle