Prologue.
All day long there had been a vague unrest in the old colonial home, all day the leaves had quivered on the banks of the Mataponi River; the waves were restless, the dog in his kennel howled fitfully; the birds and the chickens sought their roosts quiveringly, whimsically, and when night had let her sable curtain down, a lurid glare shot athwart the sky, in a strange curved comet-like shape. It was the Indian summer, October in her glory of golden-rods, sumachs, and the asters in the wood. But, hist! hark! what breaks upon the autumn stillness and the quiet of the colonial household on the Mataponi, — — ?
It was the cannon at the siege of Yorktown, forty miles away. The French fleet were making blazing half circles on the sky seen from their fortifications even thus far below.
Through the long night the boom! boom! boom! continued, the simple, loyal folks knowing nothing of the result.
At last, wearied and spent, with a prayer to the All Father to save America, they sought their welcome couches. Among them was Kitty, the idolized daughter of the family.
Soft! step easy! as we push aside the chintz curtains of her four-poster and gaze upon the child, to exclaim: How innocent is youth! Her seventeen years lie upon her pink cheeks, and shimmering curly tresses as lightly as a humming bird in the heart of roses. Her lithesome form makes a deep indenture in the thick featherbed, the gay patchwork quilt half reveals, and half conceals the grace of rounded arm and neck and breast, a sigh escapes her coral lips, one hand is thrust beneath the pillow, she dreams!
On the chair her quilted podusouy and long stays are carelessly thrown. Her Louis Seize slippers with red heels are on the floor, and the old clock on the stair is ticking, ticking, ticking.
Kitty is dreaming. Of what? The greatest moment in our national history. Dream on sweet maid, closer, closer point the hands; it nears three o'clock Oct. 19, 1781. A wild cry, and the whole household is awake.
Swift running to and fro,
Smiles, tears, shouts, "glory," "glory," "God be praised."
Such the sounds that faintly reach the dreaming senses of our Kitty. And then her father with a kiss and hug pulls her out of bed with "Awake lass! awake! awake! Cornwallis has surrendered."
In her night gown from her latticed window Kitty saw the courier galloping through the little hamlet; pausing at her father's gate to give the message of our conquest over the British, and then galloping on towards the North, for he was on the direct route from Yorktown to Philadelphia where Congress was in session.
By the time Kitty had pompadoured her hair, and donned her paviered print gown, all the parish bells were ringing for joy. From Georgia to Maine bells were sounding; peals of liberty and peace filled the air with prayers and praise and service to God took up the glad hour and over and over the refrain was sung "Cornwallis is taken! Cornwallis is taken."
Ah, dear Kitty, and quaint little tableau of the long ago, five generations coming and going, in whose veins beats your loyal blood still listen and tremble and glow with pride at your legend of the siege of Yorktown, and better still, sweetest of all the long agone ancestors more than five nations, indeed every nation honors and makes low obeisance to the stars and the stripes. "Old glory! long may she wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."