They never met George or Mabel again. Mrs. Morgan learned subsequently that two young people from the city answering their description had been guests at the opposite house, and had left Plainfield the morning after the events hereinbefore set forth, and drew her conclusions accordingly. But her husband preferred to cherish the secret belief that his theory that memories might become visible had proved true in one instance at least.
Edward Bellamy.
BRANDYWINE, 1777.
Toward noon of a September day, the fifth of the week and the eleventh of the month, 1777, a few of the steady meeting-going Friends of Birmingham had collected for their "mid-week" assembly in a wheelwright-shop at Sconnel Town, a roadside group of shops and houses that had disappeared entirely thirty years ago. Their usual place of worship, the low stone structure on the hills of Birmingham, three miles to the south, had been taken for a hospital for the sick of Washington's army, and even on the previous First Day, as they gathered at ten o'clock, they had found it being prepared for such a purpose, and had taken their seats under the shade of the trees outside. The wheelwright-shop had therefore been selected as a temporary place of meeting.
Among those gathered on this day was Joseph Townsend, a young man of twenty-one, who has left us an interesting narrative of the day's events. Much of the battle of Brandywine he saw. The day, he says, was exceedingly warm. It had been foggy in the morning, but later the mists had dissipated—doubtless to the discontent of the husbandmen, for little rain had fallen for a long time except on the 26th of August—and now the September sun was pouring down, so that in the hillside fields roundabout the ploughman, preparing his ground for winter wheat, rested his sweating horses at the end of each furrow and wiped his own beaded face with the handkerchief from his hat. The upland pastures were brown; dust had settled on the forest foliage; the whole face of Nature was athirst; and the Brandywine, flowing from north to south half a mile away, was shrunken and narrow.
As the Friends sat in the shop, hats on heads, the elders and overseers "facing the meeting," women on one side, men on the other, all on hastily-arranged benches of wheelwright planks, their silent serenity must have been inwardly disturbed, for the spiritual ear surely heard wild voices of conflict in the air. The shock of a near battle was impending; the very tread of the advancing invaders could almost be heard; already, indeed, as the Friends gathered in meeting, the fighting had begun six miles down the creek, near the ford at John and Amos Chad's.
On the preceding 20th of July—a Sunday—General David Forman, who had been patiently watching from the shores of New York Bay the embarkation of the British army upon the fleet of Lord Howe, and anxiously wondering from day to day whither the armada, with its eighteen thousand soldiers, would sail, observed an increased activity amongst the ships. One hundred and sixty sail lay inside of Sandy Hook. Next morning fifteen more came down from the city, and in the afternoon yet eighty more—mostly small brigs, schooners and sloops—came out of the Narrows and joined the fleet, so that it numbered two hundred and fifty-five sail.
On Wednesday the wind favored their departure. At half-past six in the morning the admiral's signal-gun was fired, and at seven they began to get under way. All day the vigilant Forman watched them as they passed out of the bay and moved down the Jersey coast. In three divisions they stretched away, steering mostly south-east, and moving like an immense flock of white waterfowl over the placid summer seas. He riding on shore as they sailed on the water, night found him at Shrewsbury, and thence, with all speed, he sent couriers to General Washington and to the Executive Council of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. The council, in whose archives we find his despatch, at once sent another scout, Captain John Hunn, to the Jersey coast to watch the hostile fleet. Setting off promptly, Hunn had reached the shore, near Little Egg Harbor, by two o'clock of Friday, the 25th, and thence he rode slowly down to Cape May, not seeing any of the ships, however, until the 30th, when, after three days of "thick" weather, some of them came into the view of observers on both capes of the Delaware. From the Delaware side, at ten in the morning, that truculent Sussex Whig, Henry Fisher, had discerned two hundred and twenty-eight sail, and he sent off an express to ride with might and main, up the forest roads by Dover and Cantwell's Bridge, to Wilmington, and so to Philadelphia. Leaving the cape at ten in the morning, the messenger reached Chester at a quarter before six in the afternoon, and thence hurried on.
Hunn, too, saw the ships from his post on Cape May, and only the need of being brief is reason for not giving here his quaint and badly-spelled despatches, which, however, in spite of imperfect orthography, sufficiently told the movements of the fleet.
July 31st the ships were still in the offing, but the next day not one could be seen from the Delaware capes. Howe had sailed away for the ampler waters of the Chesapeake, though the change of plan involved further delay on shipboard and exposure to the dangers of a greatly lengthened voyage. August 7th his ships were seen beating down the coast toward Cape Charles, but, encountering adverse winds, it was some ten days later before they were heard of inside the great bay.