Frenchman has crept into his hole and the war is at an end. Then they talked about the war. That was an inexhaustible subject. In that everybody had taken part--had himself fought and had his part to tell--his altogether peculiar experiences, which, if to no one else, at least to the narrator were of deep interest. They recalled the chief events of the war, wherein all agreed that the interest was supreme. These were recounted a hundred times and were gladly repeated once more, and which clothed themselves in a wonderful garb, though the eye-witnesses were yet for the most part alive. Of these peculiarly noteworthy events, none was more remarkable than the battle at Sternberg's house in the year '58. And when the deed had been told that nine men had for six or seven hours resisted one hundred and fifty well-armed enemies, incredible as it was, there was that in the history which gave it for the moment a romantic color, even in the eyes of the indifferent. The quarrel of the brothers over the beautiful maiden, who was now the handsomest wife in the whole district; the reconciliation of the brothers in the last hour, and the succeeding heroic deaths of Christian Ditmar and of Conrad Sternberg--the oldest and the youngest of the company--and both dying so nobly that one could not do better than to follow them, as Aunt Ursul said, when they were both laid in the cool earth. Yes, she had soon enough followed them--the wonderfully brave souls--she who was so rough, while her heart was so soft that she did not want to live longer, nor could she without her husband, with whom she had spent forty years in joy and sorrow--but mostly in sorrow--and without her wild, strong and last but perhaps most dearly beloved son. Yes, yes, that he was, to Aunt Ursul--the Indian, and, as they already before had called him and still called him at the lake, the great jaguar--Conrad Sternberg, wild and strong. Were he still living Cornelius Vrooman, from Schoharie, would not have carried off the victory away from the young men on the Mohawk. What Cornelius did was indeed no small matter, to draw a sleigh by the tongue, standing in the sand, loaded with twelve heavy men, half a foot from its position. Conrad would have drawn the sleigh five feet with Cornelius on his shoulders. Yes, yes, Conrad Sternberg was endowed with superhuman strength. Would he otherwise have been able to overcome twenty-four Indians who had already pressed forward to the house? And was it not more than human courage for him, whom every Onondaga had sworn to kill, notwithstanding to go to their camp and set the Onondagas and Oneidas against each other and both against the French and then to deliver himself up to the Onondagas, as they insisted on it that they might feel assured, and to tell them that he would stay with them as long as they could hold him; and the simpletons, who might have known better, had thought that six men were sufficient for this, and