Here they rested two or three days, Gist recovering from the effects of his freezing, Washington improving the opportunity to pay a visit to Queen Aliquippa, an Indian princess, whose palace--if we may venture to call it so--was near by. The royal lady had been angry that he had neglected her on his way out. This visit, an apology, and a present healed her wounded feelings, and disposed her to a gracious reception. Nothing could be learned of Vanbraam and the remainder of the party. Washington could not wait for them. He hurried forward with Gist, crossed the Alleghanies to Will's Creek, and, leaving his companion there, hastened onward to Williamsburg, anxious to put his despatches in Governor Dinwiddie's hands. He reached there on January 16, having been absent eleven weeks, during which he had traversed a distance of eleven hundred miles. What followed is matter of common history. Dinwiddie was incensed at St. Pierre's letter. The French had come to stay; that was plain. If the English wanted a footing in the land they must be on the alert. A party was quickly sent to the Ohio forks to build a fort, Washington having suggested this as a suitable plan. But hardly was this fort begun before it was captured by the French, who hastened to erect one for themselves on the spot. Washington, advancing with a supporting force, met a French detachment in the woods, which he attacked and defeated. It was the opening contest of the French and Indian War. As for Fort Duquesne, which the French had built, it gave rise to the most disastrous event of the war, the defeat of General Braddock and his army, on their march to capture it. It continued in French hands till near the end of the war, its final capture by Washington being nearly the closing event in the contest which wrested from the hands of the French all their possessions on the American continent. SOME ADVENTURES OF MAJOR PUTNAM. The vicinity of the mountain-girdled, island-dotted, tourist-inviting Lake George has perhaps been the scene of more of the romance of war than any other locality that could be named. Fort Ticonderoga, on the ridge between that beautiful sheet of water and Lake Champlain, is a point vital with stirring memories, among which the striking exploit of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain boys is of imperishable interest. Fort William Henry, at the lower end of Lake George, is memorable as the locality of one of the most nerve-shaking examples of Indian treachery and barbarity, a scene which Cooper's fruitful pen has brought well within the kingdom of romance. The history of the whole vicinity, in short, is laden with picturesque incident, and the details of fact never approached those of romantic fiction more closely than in the annals of this interesting region.