"You came along the lake almost all the way, Mother says. It must have been lovely. I'm so glad we're here at Fort Edward. It's right on the water and the sunsets are beautiful."
"This is the memorial to President McKinley," Mrs. Jackson informed the Ethels as they drove through Niagara Square. "It was in Buffalo that he was shot, you remember."
It did not take many minutes to reach Fort Edward, which they found to be merely barracks and officers' houses, with no fortified works.
"When Canada and the United States decided not to have any fortifications between the two countries it looked like a dangerous experiment," said Mrs. Jackson when the Ethels, soldiers' children, remarked upon this peculiarity of the so-called fort. "It has worked well, however. There have been times when it would have been a sore temptation to make use of the forts if they had existed."
"I wonder what would have happened in Europe if there had been no forts between Germany and France," said Ethel Blue thoughtfully.
"Armament has not brought lasting peace to them," Mrs. Jackson agreed to the girl's thought.
It was an evening of delight to the Mortons. They always realized to the full that they actually belonged to the Service when occasion took them to a fort or a navy yard. They saw the flag run down at sunset and they beamed happily at everything that Katharine pointed out to them and at all the stories that Lieutenant Jackson told them. Ethel Blue was particularly interested in his tales of the days at West Point when he and her father had ranked so nearly together that it was nip and tuck between them all the way through.
"Until the end," Mr. Jackson owned handsomely. "Then old Dick Morton came out on top."
It was novel to Ethel Blue to hear her father called "old Dick Morton," but Lieutenant Jackson said it with so much affection that she liked the sound of it.
Of course the Niagara expedition was topmost in the minds of the Ethels.