And so the maiden plunged into her books anew, and also grew skilled in embroidery, even copying the pattern on her mother's dainty cape, and copying it well too, on a skirt of fine India muslin that had lain in Mistress Brace's trunk.
A few weeks after the young Virginians had started for Boston there had come a hard battle, even the battle of Bunker Hill.
And Hotspur had borne his young master to the distant colony barely in time to take part in it, after first meeting his friends at the turnpike.
In July, Sir Percival Grandison received from his son an account of the hard contest. He told how all night he and his comrades, delicately nurtured young men all, with soft hands and lions' hearts, had worked with pick and shovel, and with the rank and file, in throwing up breastworks. And so quietly was the work done that neither a sailor in the near harbor, nor the British sentry but a little away, had heard a sound.
"Although not a great victory for us," Lionel wrote, "we yet showed what kind of men the British have to fight, and our untrained men put to flight soldiers of long experience and training. We feel sure of victory in the end."
One balmy night in August, Sally saw Mammy Leezer trundling up the road, her red and yellow rabbit's ears, or points of her bandanna turban, cocked high and important, her white cotton skirt stiff as starch could make it, and her pipe no doubt in a deep pocket.
Mammy was the only person at Ingleside who had known anything about Sally at Slipside Row. But it will be remembered she also knew something of her father, and always declared she "nebber b'long'd in dat Row, nohow."
Sally answered Mammy's cheerful greeting, and then asked, gaily:
"Going to war, Mammy?"
"Goin' to war?" cried Mammy, with a fearful rolling of eyes. "Now what you take me fo', honey? But I spect you heer'd de news. Dat Mars' Lion, he comin' home soon. Mars' Perc'val, he talkin' o' goin' to Inglan' 'fore long, and Mars' Lion, he hev to come back to Virginny and look affer de plantation and we at de cabins."