Lord Stirling had not gone out of town without taking with him a guard of dragoons; and these men, instead of being quartered at a distance, as the Tories evidently supposed they would be, had all been brought into the house; and when the attack was made in the night, the bullets and pistol balls which whizzed and whistled from that ordinarily peaceful mansion astonished the Tories, who fled. But although Lord Stirling did so much for American independence, he did not live to enjoy the fruits of it, for he died in Albany, while still in command of the Northern Department. After his death, the estate at Basking Ridge was sold, and payment for it was made in Continental money, which afterwards became of almost no value; so that for this fine property, it might be said, his family received nothing but a pile of badly printed paper. The mansion and the deer park and the emblazoned carriages are gone and forgotten; but the brave soldier, who gave up all the pleasures of a lordly position for his country, will live in history. MOLLY PITCHER. At the battle of Monmouth, where Lord Stirling so distinguished himself for the management of the artillery, another person of an entirely different station in life, of different nationality, and even different sex, played a very notable part in the working of the American cannon on that eventful day. This was a young Irishwoman, wife of an artilleryman. She was of a different disposition from ordinary women, who are glad enough to hide themselves in places of safety, if there is any fighting going on in their neighborhood. Molly was born with the soul of a soldier, and, although she did not belong to the army, she much preferred going to war to staying at home and attending to domestic affairs. She was in the habit of following her husband on his various marches, and on the day of the Monmouth battle she was with him on the field. The day was very hot. The rays of the sun came down with such force that many of the soldiers were taken sick and some died; and the constant discharges of musketry and artillery did not make the air any cooler. Molly devoted herself to keeping her husband as comfortable as possible, and she made frequent trips to a spring not far away to bring him water; and on this account he was one of the freshest and coolest artillerymen on the ground. In fact, there was no man belonging to the battery who was able to manage one of these great guns better than Pitcher. Returning from one of her trips to the spring, Molly had almost reached the place where her husband was stationed, when a bullet from the enemy struck the poor man and stretched him dead, so that Molly had no sooner caught sight of her husband than she saw him fall. She ran to the gun, but scarcely had reached it before she heard one of the officers order the cannon to be wheeled back out of the way, saying that there was no one there who could serve it as it had been served.