[Illustration: HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE] * * * * * VOL. II.--NO. 86. PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. PRICE FOUR CENTS. Tuesday, June 21, 1881. Copyright, 1881, by HARPER & BROTHERS. $1.50 per Year, in Advance. * * * * * [Illustration: THE ARREST OF EMILY GEIGER.] THE FAIR MESSENGER. BY BENSON J. LOSSING. On a warm, hazy day in January, 1849, I was at Orangeburg, South Carolina, eighty miles west of Charleston. My purpose was to visit the battle-ground of Eutaw Springs, on the right bank of the Santee River, forty miles distant. I hired a horse and gig for the journey. The steed was fleet, and the road was level and smooth most of the way. It lay through cultivated fields and dark pine forests, and across dry swamps wherein the Spanish moss hung like trailing banners from the live-oak and cypress trees. At sunset I had travelled thirty miles. I lodged at the house of a planter not far from Vance's Ferry, on the Santee, where I passed the evening with an intelligent and venerable woman (Mrs. Buxton) eighty-four years of age. She was a maiden of seventeen when the armies of Greene and Rawdon made lively times in the region of the Upper Santee, Catawba, Saluda, and Broad rivers. She knew Marion, and Sumter, and Horry, and other less famous partisans, who were frequently at her father's home, on the verge of a swamp not far from the High Hills of Santee. "We were Whigs," she said, "but the Tories were so thick and cruel around us, when Rawdon was at Camden, that father had to pretend he was a King's man to save his life and property. Oh, those were terrible times, when one was not sure on going to bed that the house would not be burned before morning." "Did you witness any exciting scenes yourself?" I inquired. "Yes, many. One in particular so stirred my young blood that I actually resolved to put on brother Ben's clothes, take our old fowling-piece, join the Swamp Fox, as the British called Marion, and fight for freedom to call my soul my own." "What was the event?" I asked. "You have read, maybe," said Mrs. Buxton, "how Lord Rawdon, after chasing General Greene far toward the Saluda, suddenly turned back, abandoned Fort Ninety-Six, and retreated toward Charleston. Well, Greene sent Harry Lee, with his light-horse, to get in front of Rawdon before he should reach the ferry on the Congaree at Granby. He was anxious to call Marion and Sumter to the same point to help Lee. Sumter was then encamped a dozen miles south of our home."