Christmas eve, 1776, was a very jolly one in the British camp. The commander, officers, and men, all thought that the American fiddle was broken and about to be hung up forever; and so, in their Saxon and Teutonic joy, they hung up their stockings. The shrewd American Squire, borrowing old Santa Claus’s coach and horses, and filling the former with bullets and powder, crossed the Delaware about midnight and suddenly dropped his presents through the camp of his foreign visitors. Never were the Hessians so taken by Christmas gifts. In fact, fourteen hundred of them were so overcome by the novel presence of Washington, that they gave themselves up to American hospitality and followed their new friends across the river to their now merry quarters. The American fiddle was mended again; and its strains of Yankee Doodle were heard across the Atlantic by a young French marquis, only nineteen years of age, of a very old family, with a very young wife, and an income of $40,000 a year,—an income in those pre-Erie and pre-petroleum times highly respectable. Other Frenchmen also listened to, and, like Lafayette, were moved by, the touching airs of freedom, which passed the Rhine also, and were drunk in with his hock by the Prussian Steuben, a military martinet and schoolmaster, much needed in our militia schoolhouse. The Baron was then generalissimo of his serene, discomposable highness, the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, whose magnificent titles would, if printed on a straight strip of paper, have easily reached across his principality; but sounding as they were, they did not fill the ear of Steuben like the notes from that repaired fiddle. The lively adagio airs also struck upon the sensitive vibrating soul of De Kalb, a noble of Alsace, lifting it to highest impulses, which carried him through four years of patriotic service, and even bore him in lofty triumph across the death channel in 1780, when at the battle of Camden he was carried away from the daring front, loaded with eleven bullets in various parts of his body. These same free airs fell upon those straight, upright Poles, Kosciusko and Pulaski, and so vivifying them by warming heats, that through the whole war they bore most fragrant fruit, until at last they stood as that vintage so ripely planted in Mrs. Browning’s verse, “Where the sun with a golden mouth doth blow Blue bubbles of grapes down a vineyard row,”— the blue grapes of blistered steel.