Down the River to the Sea

by Agnes Maule Machar

“Well, we’ll see,” said Mrs. Sandford resignedly, “if it does clear.” So she settled down to her knitting. Hugh Macnab sat scribbling in his note-book; Flora amused herself at the piano, and May hovered about the veranda, still enthralled by the spell of the “Thunder of Waters,” even in a washed-out sketch, as Kate styled it. But by and by, a warm, soft gleam stole through the mist-laden atmosphere, small patches of blue sky appeared, and, in a very short time, the color had, as if by magic, come back to the scene; the foliage stood out greener than before, and the emerald once more gemmed the center of the Horse-shoe Falls, though somewhat less than it had previously appeared.

The carriage was quickly summoned, and they were soon rolling smoothly along the road that led away from the river, through the quiet little village of Drummondville—back to Lundy’s Lane.

“You see we are really beginning at the end,” said Kate. “Lundy’s Lane came at the close of the war, in 1814, and it began in October, 1812, at Queenston Heights, which we are going to see this afternoon. For, you see, the American troops kept harassing this border for a couple of years.”

“Just as your English forefathers used to harass my Scotch ones long ago,” said Hugh.

“Oh, and I suppose the Scotch never did likewise! Indeed, I rather think they were a good deal the worst,” laughed Kate. “But, at any rate, this sort of thing had been going on for nearly two years, keeping the poor people in a state of constant dread, and I think Sir Gordon Drummond and his sixteen hundred men, part of them British troops and part Canadian volunteers, must have been pretty tired of it. He made up his mind, however, that, come what might, he wouldn’t retire before even five thousand Americans. That hill there was where he stationed his troops, and, as the guidebook says, they stayed there, though the Americans did their best to drive them off. At last they tired out the American general, who fell off with his defeated army to their camp, away up there beyond Chippewa—in the direction we walked the first afternoon—and I believe they never halted till they got back to Fort Erie, from whence they had come.”

“Your Canadian volunteers must have been a plucky lot of fellows; no disgrace to the British flag they bore,” Hugh observed.

“Yes, and it wasn’t only the men who were plucky,” May remarked, somewhat shyly. “The summer before Lundy’s Lane, a woman did one of the bravest deeds of the whole war. Her name was Laura Secord, and she was the wife of a militiaman who had been crippled in the war. She found out that the American troops were on the march from Fort George, down at the mouth of the river, with the object of cutting off a little garrison of volunteers entrenched at a place called Beaver Dam. If the Americans could have managed this it would have been a great blow to the Canadians; and, as there was no one to warn them, this brave young woman determined to walk all the way—and a very lonely way it was—through the woods, to warn Fitzgibbon, the British commander. She succeeded in getting through the Yankee lines, and arrived safely at the little Canadian garrison; and when the American troops arrived they met so hot a reception from sharp-shooters concealed in the woods, with a few British soldiers in front, that the commander thought he was trapped into an encounter with the whole British force, and precipitately surrendered his six hundred men, guns and all, to a Canadian force of much less than half his own numbers.”

“Well,” exclaimed Hugh, his eye lighting, and his cheek flushing, “that was a brave woman. Such an exploit as that, in our old border wars would have been immortalized in a ballad.”

“It has been the subject of two or three Canadian poems,” Kate replied. “May knows all about them, and I have no doubt she could recite some of the verses about Laura Secord.”

And May, on being pressed, recited a portion of a ballad rather shyly, but still with a good deal of spirit, and seeming to feel more at home with the formidable Hugh, through their fellow-feeling about such traditionary tales. They looked at the little hill and tried to imagine the scene, when, at sunset, the guns mingled their ominous roar with the majestic thunder of the Falls, until recalled by Mrs. Sandford to the recollection that it was nearly lunch-time. They drove some distance further along the pretty shady lane, with its bordering gardens and orchards on either side, and then rapidly returned to the hotel.