She then tried to make the children understand that liberty was something as high and wide, and as vast, as the beautiful mountains which rose before them. “It is like the air,” she said, “or the atmosphere, which stretches about you on every side, and around the great earth like a gray blanket. It is so big it can’t be seen, like the mountains, or measured, and yet it can be felt. For if you were shut up in a box without any air, or atmosphere to breathe into your lungs, you would die. So liberty, God’s special gift, is so dear and sweet to man, that without it he can’t grow or expand, for he is like a man shut up in a box without air. He is like a little Tom Thumb, for he can only grow just so high.”
Nathalie now interested the children in the story of the Pilgrims, the pioneers of liberty in America, telling how, because they were not allowed to have liberty under the rule of the English king, they came to this new world and sought to worship God as they deemed right. In doing this, she explained, they not only founded a colony where they had the right to worship God as their conscience dictated, but they made religious freedom possible for the people who came after them. By the signing of the Compact in the cabin of the Mayflower, they gave this nation democratic liberty, by giving every man the right to express his thoughts and feelings, thus giving him a say as to how the people should be ruled, which meant a government for and by the people.
Nathalie now told of the patriots, and how, in the War of the Revolution, they fought the mother-country, England, in order to maintain the liberty given them by the founders of the nation. “By uniting the thirteen colonies into one, they not only added unity to justice and liberty, but gave us the United States of America.
“These lovers of liberty also organized a society, in New York, which became known as the Sons of Liberty, all the members determined to defend with their lives the liberty and principles given them by their forefathers. As liberty means the right to express our thoughts and feelings, it also means that these thoughts and feelings must be good and pure, the best within us,” added the girl with sudden gravity. “And these Sons of Liberty were so called not only because they fought for liberty, but because they gave of their best to mankind.”
Danny added another link to this story of liberty by telling about the Declaration of Independence, and how the Liberty Bell was rung from the old State House in Philadelphia, so that every one should know that a new nation had been born. The ride of Paul Revere was described with spirited impressiveness by the boy, as well as what had occurred on Lexington common, and the famous battle by the old North Bridge at Concord.
Whereupon Nathalie pointed out Mount Washington’s cone-tipped crest, majestically rising above a wreath of silver-gray clouds, and explained that, although the Indians had named it Agiochook, in later years the white people had named it Mount Washington, in honor of the great man Danny had been telling about.
After dwelling upon Washington’s magnificent character, and recalling little incidents from his life, Nathalie said that, like the great mountain that towered so far above its fellows, so George Washington, the first President of this great nation, was known to civilization as one of the greatest men in the world, because he had given of his best to help his fellow-men, and proved that he was a true Son of Liberty.
Jefferson Mountain, its crest rising in low humility near Washington’s greater height; Adams, whose stony front stood forth in rugged grandeur on the left; and Madison, Monroe, Franklin, Clay, and Webster, as well as other peaks, were pointed out to the children, each one named for some great American, who had proved his right to be known as a Son of Liberty.
To be sure, some of the peaks were shrouded in a veil of mystical haze, while others were but dimly discerned, as they peeped between the gaps made by their nearer mates, but each and every one served to illustrate in whose honor it had been named, and why he was a lover of what every one loved—liberty.
Nathalie now drew the children’s attention to Mount Lafayette, and said that this peak had also been named in honor of a great man, also a Son of Liberty, although he was not an American. The children had heard the name of Lafayette mentioned so often in connection with the present war, that they listened with greedy avidity as the girl told about this “Boy of Versailles,” as some one had called him, when, as the young Marquis de Lafayette,—a mere boy,—he used to lead the revels at that famous French palace in helping the girl queen, Marie Antoinette, make merry at her garden parties, when her boy husband was too busy in his workshop, taking some old clock apart, to entertain his guests at court.