ks. One decrepit old drake only escaped by skurrying under the barn.
Bowing low till his plume swept the horse's mane, Tarleton galloped away.
The wrath of Aunt Molly! "Here, Pompey, you just catch that drake. Ride as fast as you can, and present it to Colonel Tarleton with my compliments."
On flying steed, drake squawking and flouncing on his back, the darkey flew after the troopers.
"Well, Pompey, did you overtake Colonel Tarleton?" was Aunt Molly's wrathful inquiry.
"Yes'm."
"What did he say?"
"He put de drake in his wallet, and say he much obleeged!"
Little Meriwether, sitting on the gate-post, laughed at his aunt's discomfiture.
The roll of a drum broke the stillness of Sabbath in the Blue Ridge.
"Tarleton's troop!" By the bed of her sick husband sat a Spartan mother at Staunton. Her sons were in the army at the north, but three young lads, thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen were there.
Placing their father's old firelock in their hands, "Go forth, my children," she said, "repel the foot of the invader or see my face no more."
But Tarleton did not force the mountain pass,—the boys went on down to join Lafayette.
From farm and forest, children and grandsires hurried to Lafayette. The proud earl retired to the sea and stopped to rest at the little peninsula of Yorktown, waiting for reinforcements.
Down suddenly from the north came Washington with his tattered Continentals and Rochambeau's gay Frenchmen, and the French fleet sailed into the Chesapeake. Cornwallis was bottled up at Yorktown.
The boy, Lafayette, had simply put the stopper in the bottle and waited.
Seventy cannon rolled in on Yorktown. George Rogers Clark, all the West, was appealing to
