“Oh, gracious!”
The exclamation burst from the lips of a slender girl mounted upon a small black mare, and she drew rein abruptly.
“What is it, Peggy?” asked a sweet-faced matron, leaning from the side of a “one horse chair” drawn up under the shade of a tree by the roadside. “What hath happened? Thee seems dismayed.”
“I am, mother,” answered the girl, springing lightly from the back of the horse. “My saddle girth hath broken, and both Robert and Tom are back with the wagons. There is a breakdown. What shall I do? This will cause another delay, I fear.”
“Thee can do nothing, Peggy, until Robert returns. Try to content thyself until then.”
“I could repair it myself, I believe, if I only had a string,” said the maiden. “I wonder if there isn’t one in the chaise. Let’s look, mother.”
Throwing the bridle over her arm the girl joined her mother, and the two began a hasty search of the vehicle.
It was a golden day in September, 1778, and the afternoon sun was flooding with light the calm and radiant landscape afforded by the wooded slopes of Chestnut Hill, penetrating even the dense branches that overarched the highroad leading to Germantown.
It was one of those soft, balmy days when the fathomless daylight seemed to stand and dream. A cool elixir was in the air. The distant range of hills beyond the river Schuylkill was bound with a faint haze, a frail transparency whose lucid purple barely veiled the valleys. From the motionless trees the long clean shadows swept over tangles of underbrush brightened by the purple coronets of asters, feathery plumes of goldenrod, and the burning glory of the scarlet sumac. Ranks of silken thistles blown to seed disputed possession of the roadside with lowly poke-bushes laden with Tyrian fruit.
The view from the crest of the hill where the chaise had stopped was beautiful. The great forest land spread out beneath seemed boundless in extent, for the farms scattered among the woodland were scarcely visible from the height, but the maiden and her mother were so intent upon the mishap of the broken strap as to be for the nonce insensible to the delights of the scenery. So absorbed were they that they started violently when a voice exclaimed: