A ballad that I heard a young girl sing one day not long before. Thus the length of my ride passed quickly away until Toby felt the soft grass under his feet as I rode silently across the lawn. Her window was high, it is true, but it was open to admit the fresh, cool breeze from the bay, and then I had not thrown quoits in my youth not to be able to surmount so small a difficulty. So I fastened a black cockade amid the blood-red of the roses, and, rising in my stirrups, threw them firmly and gently, and saw them rise in the air, top the window-sill, and fall with a slight thud upon the floor. I did not wait for more, but turned and rode away; but it seemed to me that as I gained the shadow of the forest and looked back I saw the faint suggestion of a girlish form standing at the open window. I looked once again and rode on. When morning came, I bade good-bye to my mother, mounted my black colt Toby, and rode away to join the Maryland Line, which was marching now from Boston, to meet the British before New York. As that day I crossed the line into the province of Delaware, I saw nailed to a great oak the proclamation of the Committee of Public Safety, denouncing Charles Gordon as a Tory and a traitor, and calling upon all persons to have no dealings with him, either in public or private, at their peril. And thus it was at every cross-roads in the county of Cecil, and in all the counties to the south and west, the edict had gone forth. Now in Maryland, as I have said before, we love, above all else, courage in a man, and so I rode under the oak, and tore down the proclamation, for I knew the courage of Charles Gordon, Tory though he was. I knew also that the proceedings of forfeiture had been instituted against him in the High Court of the Province, and that ere I set foot on the soil of Maryland again, he would be driven from the province, and it was for this that I paid this courtesy to the courage of an enemy, as I left my native plains behind me. It was a long road for a lad, but the people received me with open arms and urged me on when I told them whither I was riding. After several days of travelling along the shore of the Delaware and across the low-lying plains of New Jersey, I came to the banks of the Hudson, and saw across the water the great city of New York, its clustering houses and steeples. And then it was not long before I was on the ferry that conveyed me across the river, and heard the sharp ring of the pavement under my horse's feet as I rode toward the great common where lay the encampment of the troops. It was near twelve o'clock when I came to the camp of the patriots and asked my way of an officer to the quarters of the Maryland Line. "You must be a stranger," he said, "or you would know that the Maryland Line always has the place of honour in the camp;" and he showed me where their quarters lay.