It was but the work of a moment before help reached them, but that moment had saved poor Willie’s life, and changed forever the opinions of the school. They had learned what true courage was. Tony Butler might be timid and insignificant, but he had proved himself beyond a doubt worthy of his illustrious name, and a fit hero for the Twenty-second. A VENTURE IN 1777[M] By S. WEIR MITCHELL A good, long boy’s story of how three Philadelphia lads spent an exciting Christmas at Valley Forge, after performing a service of great value to the patriots’ cause. I This is a story of a boy and two other boys. Tom Markham was fifteen and over, and was careful when asked his age to say he was in his sixteenth year. His brothers were two years younger. When Harry was asked how old he was he said he was as old as Bill, and when any one inquired his age of Bill he replied that he was as old as Harry. This was because being twins they got somehow mixed up when they were born, and no one knew which was ten minutes the older. Between themselves the twins considered the matter of precedence based on age as important, and now and then endeavored to adjust matters by wager of battle. It was settled at last by the elder brother, Tom, who decided that they should be elder year about. Thus, in 1777 Bill was the older, and was sadly regarding the lapse into youth which was about to come in 1778, when Harry would be in turn the senior. While Tom, who was to be sixteen in February, looked older, his brothers appeared younger than their years, and were two saucy, clever, reckless lads. A look of child-like innocence was part of the protective capital the twins invested in mischief. They fought one another, made common cause against the world, and had, as concerned Tom, a certain amount of respect founded on physical conditions. At the close of this year 1777, Sir William Howe held the city of Penn with some eighteen thousand men. Twenty miles away George Washington waited in his lines at Valley Forge with three or four thousand half-starved soldiers. Between the two armies Nature had established a nearly neutral ground, for on it lay the deepest snow the land had known for many a year. It was both foe and friend to the Continental soldiers, whom starvation and cold were daily tempting to desertion, and among whom disease in many forms was busily recruiting for the army of the dead. The well-fed British regulars in and near the city found in the snow an obstacle which forbade Sir William Howe to move, discouraged enterprise, and gave excuses for inertness, since no general at that time ventured to think of a winter campaign, until in ’78 the Virginia general read his enemy a novel lesson in the art of war.