“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” replied Allen. And the surrender was made. So easily and quietly did Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold capture Ticonderoga from the British on that early morning in May, 1775, without the loss of a man or the firing of a gun, and the army of the colonies was enriched by many precious cannon, muskets, and a large amount of ammunition for the struggle for freedom that had but started. “Sounding waters” is the interpretation given to the Indian name, Ticonderoga. Here, where the waters of Lake George descend tumultuously into Lake Champlain, falling thirty feet in one sheer drop, where the voyagers from Canada to New England had to leave their boats, and portage their loads, a fort had been built by the French twenty years before. Three years after it was put up, Ticonderoga was attacked by six thousand British regulars and ten thousand provincials. The four thousand men of the French garrison repulsed the attacking army, and among the killed was Lord Howe. His memory is kept fresh by a tablet in Westminster Abbey, erected by the people of Massachusetts. Three weeks after this repulse, when Montcalm had gone to Quebec to oppose General Wolfe and only four hundred men were left in the fort, Lord Amherst, with eleven thousand English, besieged it. Realizing the hopelessness of their task, the garrison blew up the fortifications and abandoned the place. It had been in English hands since that time up to its capture by the “Green Mountain Boys” under Ethan Allen. Two years later, when General Burgoyne descended from Canada, the fort was captured, while the Americans retreated after a feeble resistance. But when Burgoyne surrendered, after the battle of Saratoga, Ticonderoga again fell into American hands. In 1909, on the three hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Lake Champlain, the owner of the ground on which the ruins of the fort stood began its restoration. The waters still roar at the falls as they did on the night Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys made the bloodless attack upon the fort. PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 32, SERIAL No. 32 COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC. [Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL] _HISTORIC SPOTS OF AMERICA_ _Independence Hall_ FOUR Of the sixty American gentlemen in frosted wigs and silk stockings, who sat in what is now Independence Hall in Philadelphia and composed the Continental Congress, there was none more aristocratic by birth, more democratic by nature, than Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps that was one reason why they selected him to pen the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, which remains today America’s most sacred historical document. He was sufficiently modest, however, to insist that in writing the Declaration he simply put down the ideas prevalent at the time.