Now the Mayflower entered the Potomac, a stream whose every mile is peopled with the ghosts of the history-makers. Here the imaginative Frenchmen, leaning over the steamer’s rail, with the incomparable landscape slipping past, could not but have yielded to the river’s mystic spell. Lulled by the ripple of the water running aft along the hull, they found themselves living in this region’s storied and romantic past. Indians in paint and feathers slipped silently along in their barken war-canoes. Lean and sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman, floated past them down the stream. A square-rigged merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland, seeking a spot at which its band of colonists might land. Frigates, flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from their tiers of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for river-bars. Log forts and trading posts and mission stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow dust-cloud rose above the river-bank and out of it emerged a plodding wagon train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires spiraled skyward from those rich Maryland valleys, where in reality sleek cattle browsed in lush-green pastures and the orchards were pink and white with promised fruit. Borne on the night wind came the rumble of ghostly cannonading, and the thoughts of the visitors harked back to the month-long battle of the Wilderness, fought yonder, amid the Virginia forests, by the armies of Grant and Lee. Dawn came, and out of the mist to starboard loomed the peninsula of Indian Head, where the ridiculed inventor, Langley, flew, for the first time in history, a motor-driven aeroplane--forerunner of the thousands of aircraft which to-day swoop and soar and circle above the battle-line. In the very waters through which the Mayflower was now ploughing, a poor Irish schoolmaster, John Philip Holland, evolved the marvel of the undersea boat and thereby did more to shape the course of this war than Haig or Hindenburg or Marshal Joffre himself. Now above the port rail, high on its wooded hillside, showed the stately white façade of Mount Vernon, the home of the founder of this nation and the first leader of its armies, and, close by, the modest brick tomb where the great soldier and his wife lie sleeping. Rounding the river bend, the mighty shaft of the Washington Monument rose skyward like a pointing finger, as though emphasizing the motto graved upon our coins. Alexandria, with its white steeples and its old, old houses, came in view, and beyond it the templed hills of Arlington, where rest, in their last bivouac, the men who died for the Union. Now the long journey of the Frenchmen was almost finished; their destination was at hand. Slowly, with much clanging of bells and shouting of orders, the white yacht sidled up to the quay, the gangway