In the early September days, Generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson were both here with the armies, gathering for the fearful struggles of South Mountain and Antietam. On the night of the 7th General Jackson drove into town in an ambulance, to attend divine service in the Reformed Church, where, as he wrote to his wife, and as is told of him by many who saw him, he fell asleep. On the morning of the 10th, the camps breaking, and the march over the mountain beginning, General Jackson, with Major H. Kyd Douglass of his staff, rode to the Presbyterian manse on Second Street, to pay his respects to his friends, the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Ross. As they had not yet arisen, the General pencilled a line of greeting and farewell, with military precision noting the hour, “5¹⁄₄ A.M.,” and remounting his horse under the great silver-poplar rode down Mill Alley, a narrow lane which crosses Carroll Creek by a ford and a high foot-bridge, and so on to the Pike, or Patrick Street, where he rejoined his command, and led them westward. [Illustration: BARBARA FRITCHIE.] A few hundred yards to the east of Mill Alley, and again across a winding of Carroll Creek, lived a very old and intensely loyal woman, Barbara Fritchie, who was no myth, but a figure familiar to Frederick from time immemorial. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on December 3, 1766, she had come, as Barbara Hauer, to Frederick so many years before that on the occasion of the visit of General Washington in 1791 and a ball given in his honor, she loaned some of her choice china to adorn the table, and his Excellency drank a cup of tea poured from her yet carefully cherished teapot. She and her husband, John Fritchie, a glover, had long lived in a small house adjoining the creek which was demolished after one of the perilous floods to which the stream was formerly subject. On the opposite side of the creek is a tiny park, with a deep, cool spring which is often called by her name, and from which many a weary soldier drank. She was of the Reformed faith, and her devotion to the Union cause was almost passionate. Small hospitality had she for the tired Confederate who sometimes dropped for a moment’s rest upon her “stoop.” Such visitors were shown her cane, and in most vigorous Saxon were invited to “move on.” It was said that just before the battle of South Mountain, as the Union troops were passing her house, General Reno, seeing her venerable welcoming face, asked her age. [Illustration: HOME OF BARBARA FRITCHIE.]