“I tell you--” suddenly the old gentleman thrust out his arms, as though to free his elbows from restraint. Then he leaned back and began to rock. His daughter, if she had been present, would have laid down her book and taken up her sewing and would have begun a long seam. “I tell you that this is the most interesting State in the United States and this the most interesting county in the State. We had squatter troubles, whites pushing into the country which had not yet been bought from the Indians, and thereby endangering the safety of the whole border, men who refused to move back, pioneers of the finest water, but law-breakers in fact. It’s interesting to think where the world would have been by this time if laws hadn’t been broken, if squatters hadn’t pushed on and buccaneers hadn’t sailed the main.” Elizabeth sat on the doorstep, her hands clasped round her knees. If only Herbert were here!--but Herbert had ridden up into the woods. “Then we had interesting Jesuit settlements, overflow by mistake from Lord Baltimore’s land to the south. We had all the ante-war troubles, slaves escaping over the border and claiming our protection. We protected ’em too with a flourishing underground railroad. But the brigands used to capture them; sometimes they captured our own free darkies and carried them off. There was a young black woman with her children who had lived as a free woman in our county, who was captured and carried screaming in the dead of night through the streets of Gettysburg, she and each of her children across the saddle of a rascal. A posse was made up, but they couldn’t be rescued. In the end they got back, and one of those children grew up in my grandfather’s family. When the Confederates came she crept under the old valanced bed in the downstairs bedroom, and my little brother who crept in there too always remembered two details, the spurred feet of the officers which he could see under the valance and the deathly green-gray of that young girl’s face. She must have been almost twenty, but the terror had never left her. “Then we had the battle, and you will acknowledge that that was something!” “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “What happened about here at the time of the battle?” Colonel Thomas stooped and picked up one of the books which he had laid on the doorstep. “The best lengthy account of the battle was written by a famous Frenchman, the Count of Paris. Here it is.” He turned from page to page.