The answer to the riddle is not as puzzling as it would seem. I am now man grown, with children of my own. Many years ago I put together this story, and to-day, desiring that my own boys may read it, I am running over the leaves to add here or there that which may make plain what I, a lad of seventeen years, overlooked at the time, or believed to be of little importance. How strange it is that the same thing appears entirely different when viewed from the standpoints of a man and a lad! This is what Mr. Lossing says concerning the time of which I wrote when everything was fresh in my mind, and the sense of a wrong done this country by England still rankling deep in my heart: "On the 6th of August (1814) the small British squadron in the Chesapeake was reinforced by a fleet of twenty-one vessels under Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, the senior commander on the American station. These were soon joined by another under Commodore Sir Charles Malcolm. These vessels bore several thousand land troops commanded by General Ross, an Irish officer, and one of Wellington's most active leaders. Washington and Baltimore appear to have been chosen objects of attack simultaneously. A part of the British naval force, under Sir Peter Parker, went up the Chesapeake toward Baltimore, and another portion, under Captain Gordon, went up the Potomac. "At that time Commodore Barney, with a flotilla of thirteen armed barges and the schooner Scorpion, with an aggregate of about five hundred men, was in the Patuxent river. His vessels had been chased out of the Chesapeake, and blockaded in St. Leonard's Bay. Of this confinement they were relieved by some artillery under Colonel Henry Carbery, with which he drove away the Loire, the blockading frigate, when the released flotilla went up the Patuxent, first to Benedict, and then to Nottingham, that it might be within co-operating distance of both Washington and Baltimore. "Seeing this, the British determined to capture or destroy it, and on the 18th of August a force of a little more than five thousand men, composed of regulars, marines, and negroes went up the Patuxent, and landed at Benedict with three cannon, under cover of an armed brig. Most of the other large British vessels were below, some of them aground, and all too heavy to ascend the comparatively shallow stream.