"Or in getting ready to fight them again the next day," added Lulu.
"I think there was fighting the next day,—wasn't there, Papa?" said Max.
"Yes; though not a regular battle. Burgoyne was attempting a retreat, which the Americans, constantly increasing in numbers, were preventing,—destroying bridges, obstructing roads leading northward, and guarding the river to the eastward, so that the British troops could not cross it without exposure to a murderous artillery fire. At last, finding his provisions nearly exhausted, himself surrounded by more than five times his own number of troops, and all his positions commanded by his enemy's artillery, the proud British general surrendered."
"And it was a great victory,—wasn't it, Papa?" asked Lulu.
"It was, indeed! and God, the God of our fathers, gave it to the American people. The time was one of the great crises of history. Before that battle things looked very dark for the people of this land; and if Burgoyne had been victorious, the probability is that the struggle for liberty would have been given up for no one knows how long. Perhaps we might have been still subject to England."
"And that would be dreadful!" she exclaimed with warmth,—"wouldn't it, Max?"
"Yes, indeed!" he assented, his cheek flushing, and his eye kindling; "the idea of this great country being governed by that bit of an island away across the sea! I just feel sometimes as if I'd like to have helped with the fight."
"In that case," returned his father, with an amused look, "you would hardly be here now; or, if you were, you would be old enough to be my grandfather."
"Then I'm glad I wasn't, sir," laughed Max; "for I'd rather be your son by a great deal. Papa, wasn't it about that time the stars and stripes were first used?"
"No, my son; there was at least one used before that," the Captain said with a half smile,—"at Fort Schuyler, which was attacked by St. Leger with his band of British troops, Canadians, Indians, and Tories, early in the previous August. The garrison was without a flag when the enemy appeared before it, but soon supplied themselves by their own ingenuity, tearing shirts into strips to make the white stripes and stars, joining bits of scarlet cloth for the red stripes, and using a blue cloth cloak, belonging to one of the officers, as the groundwork for the stars. Before sunset it was waving in the breeze over one of the bastions of the fort, and no doubt its makers gazed upon it with pride and pleasure."