"The Lord was good to us."
"How?"
The question came with an accent of indignation. Sometimes he couldn't help getting cross with his mother when she began to give the Lord credit for everything. If the Lord did it all why should he give his string of fish to an old soldier!
The grey eyes looked into his with wistful tenderness. She had been shocked once before by the fear that there was something in this child's eternal why that would keep him out of the church. The one deep desire of her heart was that he should be good.
"Would you like to hear," she began softly, "something about the Revolution which my old school teacher told me in Virginia?"
"Yes, tell me!" he answered eagerly.
"He said that we could never have won our independence but for God. We didn't win because British soldiers couldn't fight. We held out for ten years because we outran them. We ran quicker, covered more ground, got further into the woods and stayed there longer than any fighters the British had ever met before. That's why we got the best of them. Our men who fought and ran away lived to fight another day. General Washington was always great in retreat. He never fought unless he was ready and could choose his own field. He waited until his enemies were in snug quarters drinking and gambling, and then on a dark night, so dark and cold that some of his own men would freeze to death, he pushed across a river, fell on them, cut them to pieces and retreated.
"The number of men he commanded was so small he could not face his foes in the open if he could avoid it. His men were poorly armed, poorly drilled, half-clothed and half-starved at times. The British troops were the best drilled and finest fighting men of the world in their day, armed with good guns, well fed, well clothed, and well paid."
She paused and smiled at the memory of her teacher's narrative.
"What do you suppose happened on one of our battlefields?"