The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure — John Shaqi
The Road to Paris: A Story of AdventureStephens, Robert Neilson
History
The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure
Stephens, Robert Neilson
Adventure stories; Historical fiction; United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 -- Fiction
a lot of religious books from the servant of a very old lady recently
deceased. The dealer had thought, from the company in which it came,
that the "travels and adventures" were those of some clergyman of a
hundred years ago, and he had placed the three much dilapidated volumes
among the ten-cent rubbish accordingly.
In giving this astonishing record of eighteenth century vicissitudes to
the world, I have two reasons for making myself the historian, and not
presenting the hero's book in his own correct and straightforward
English. The first reason is, the public has been so satiated recently
with novels told in the first person singular, that even a genuine
autobiography must at this time be swallowed, if at all, with some
nausea. The second reason is that the hero, writing only of his own
doings and his own witnessings and in his own day, necessarily omitted
many details, obtainable by me from other sources, and useful not only
for filling in the background of his narrative, but also that they throw
light on some points that were not quite clear to himself.
THE ROAD TO PARIS.
CHAPTER I.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS.
In the Jacobite army that followed Prince Charlie and shared defeat with
him at Culloden in 1746, were some who escaped hanging at Carlisle or
elsewhere by fleeing to Scottish ports and obtaining passage over the
water. A few, like the Young Chevalier himself, fled to the continent of
Europe; but some crossed the ocean and made new lives for themselves in
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other provinces. Two of these refugees,
tarrying not in the thickly settled strip of country along the Atlantic
coast, but pushing at once to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, were Hugh
Mercer, the young surgeon destined to die gloriously as an American
general thirty years later, and Alexander Wetheral, one of the few
Englishmen who had rallied to the Stuart standard at its last unfurling.
From Philadelphia, where they disembarked from the vessel that had
brought them from Leith, straight westward through Lancaster and across
the Susquehanna, the two young men made a journey which, thanks to the
privations they had to endure, was a good first lesson in the school of
wilderness life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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