table where I sit as guest, I shall be lost to truth and honor, and be too vile to remember." He spoke with force, and with a certain eloquence, very different from his usual familiar manner, and both Agnes and Maria showed him in their shining eyes and confiding air how surely they believed in him.

After this event there was continual excitement in the city, and General Clinton returned to it at once. He called in the little army he had cutting grass for winter fodder, and with twenty thousand troops shut himself up in New York.

"For once the man has been employing himself well and wiselike," said Madame Semple. "He has cut all the grass, and cured all the grass round about Rye, and White Plains and New Rochelle, and East Chester, and a few other places; and he has left it all ahint him. What a wiselike wonderfu' man is General Sir Henry Clinton!"

"And the rebels have carried off the last wisp o' hay he made," said the Elder angrily. "They were on the vera heels o' our soldiers. It's beyond believing! It's just the maist mortifying thing that ever happened us."

Madame looked pityingly at her husband, raised her shoulders to emphasize the look, and then in a thin voice, quavering a little with her weakness and emotion, began to sing to herself from that old translation of the Psalms so dear to every Scottish heart:

"Kings of great armies foiled were And forced to flee away; And women who remained at home Did distribute the prey. God's chariots twenty thousand are, Thousands of angels strong."

"Janet! Janet! Will you sing some kind o' calming verse? The Lord is naething but a man of war in your thoughts. Do you believe He goes through the earth wi' a bare, lifted sword in His hand?"

"Whiles He does, Alexander. And the light from that lifted sword lightens the earth. I hae tasted o' the goodness of the Lord; I know of old His tender mercy, and His loving kindness, but in these awfu' days, I am right glad to think o' Him as The Lord of Hosts! He is sure to be on the right side, and He can make of one man a thousand, and of a handful, a great multitude."

"It's a weary warld."

"But just yet there's nae better one, my dear auld man! So we may as well tak' cheerfully what good comes to-day, there will be mair tomorrow, or I'm far wrang."

If Janet's "tomorrow" be taken as she meant 

 Prev. P 66/224 next