"But hear father out, sir," exclaimed the elder son.

a great reader and traveler. Father's been to Europe!"

"

He's been

It was not common in 1859 to have "been to Europe," and even the young Baltimorean looked at Smith with new interest.

The old man pointed over the valley with long fingers, his shoulders stooping a little, and his retreating forehead, hollow in the center, assisting the hawkness of his nose.

Lines of thought and an abstracted countenance marked his face while moving up and down and consulting the ground, but when he faced Lloyd Quantrell and his own sons, and gave them the full benefit of his steady and penetrating eyes, they felt that the narrow-shouldered, wiry old fellow must be a tall man.

He now took his beard in one hand, and with the other pointing over the autumnal-tinted plain and detached mountains, gazed out like some Hebrew seer.

"You want your political capital, gentlemen, where it has natural defenses against a military enemy, such as mountains interpose, and has population and agriculture enough to feed and defend it, and is also in a position to exert all its political influence with what I will call geographical directness on the country. The city of Washington can do nothing of that kind. It was easily taken and destroyed by a small army in the year 1814. Before it. was established the people in its vicinity were getting their food from these German upland valleys. It has now no political influence at all, except a pernicious one, on the American people, having been governed for sixty years by the local ideas of two places— Richmond in Virginia and Baltimore in Maryland. Those cities were bound to influence it in the line of their very backward, or, as some say, conservative tendencies, because they received no other elements of population that lived around them in the old tide-water parts-people who continued to raise tobacco, catch herring, sell negroes, and marry their cousins. On the other hand, the country above the South Mountain ridge could subsist a very large population, and feed a large army, during repeated years of war. This mountain, with its natural ramparts, could be easily held by a few troops at the passes. The great valley behind it is the line of emigration and of easy communication from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, and, gentlemen, the inevitable line of war!"

Without paying attention to anybody, Smith reached out his hand and took the spear instrument from his son, and, gesturing

with it against the blue air, looked to Quantrell to be a colossal and seedy school-master, illustrating a lecture on an enormous blackboard.

"It will cost more fighting men than can be levied from all that tide-water country," he continued, "merely to protect the government and the public property located at the city of Washington. If the capital had been placed here, in the Cumberland Valley, it would have been able to launch armies against the enemy and protect itself from a perpetually flanking second army, moving up the valley and getting to the north of Washington. Here will the enemy invade once and again, and have the start in the race, and be deep in the resources and positions of your country before you can come up with him and make him turn and fight. I would remove the public effects from Washington. I would hold Baltimore to her allegiance by Fortress Monroe. I would take the valley of the Cumberland Mountains from them at the beginning, leaving them to scratch clay and eat fodder on the emaciated plains, and I would fight them from the west!"

"Crazy as a bedbug," thought Lloyd Quantrell, a little awed, "and on the subject of the Revolutionary War."

Sticking the fish-spear in the sward and apostrophizing it, Mr. Smith, now apparently aroused and in the depth of his subject, continued in the same plain, brief style of address:

"This is why God has established the Alleghany Mountainsfor the refuge of his people! The geologist tells us that the first mountains in the world to be made were the Adirondacks. My schooling was all before these days of science, and I don't just quite get the idea. But if it be so, that the first land to rise above the sea and give the raven foothold after the deluge was there, where our household affections look to-day " (he glanced at his sons), even upon that Ararat, I was always thinking of my boyhood, when I was a tanner on these Alleghanies.

"Yes," resumed Isaac Smith, after a pause, “in the year 1826 I was tanning leather near the spot where General Washington—at your ages now, and my age when I lived there-went on his long winter journey to stop the French at old Fort Le Bœuf. I used to look at the creek that supplied my vats, and wish I could follow it down to the Venango and the Alleghany, and ascend Washington's path by the Monongahela to the mountains and cross them to the Potomac. I married there, and the desire of money arrested my

dreams; but every energy I put out in that direction failed. At times great fortunes seemed within my grasp, but slipped from me. In Europe, where I went for business, I found my mind led to battle-fields and the study of war. I tried to drive the idea away, and regain my credit in the business of all my maturer life—grading and selling wool; for I could tell the difference in similar wools raised in different of our States if they were put in my hand in the dark! But the confused verses of Scripture would rise in my mind whenever I heard the military trumpets sound abroad: 'He seeketh wool and worketh willingly, but all his household are clothed in scarlet!'"

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'And now, old man," exclaimed the irreverent Quantrell, "you think you are at last back in a good country!"

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'Yes, Mr. Quantrell," said Isaac Smith, soberly, "I am in the country of my destiny. I love this country, and hope it may be loved for me and my children."

"You have made one mourner in advance, pop," answered Lloyd. "I think you only need to have been born in a military age to have reached the consideration of Sam Houston or General Jackson. But, unfortunately, you could no more get these Dutch, up this way, to fight than teach them style."

"We never can tell, gentlemen,” said Smith, “when war is, as you may say, at our elbow. I have been a great reader of the history of wars, particularly in the Old Testament. Most of the wars there recorded, were made by Moses, acting out the will of God. He led the Hebrews out of their bondage in Egypt and toward a land of promise. The people in that land, we may understand, had done no harm to Moses or his people. They existed as peaceably as the people of Virginia and Maryland, that we see from this elevation— working for the dollar and expecting no enemy whatever. But Moses, who was keeping his flocks on the back side of the desert, as we read, went out on the mountain of God, even to Horeb,' say the Scriptures. Something took him there not in the way of interest, perhaps not his desire. But there he heard his name called aloud from a burning bush, or heap of brush-'Moses, Moses!' And he said, 'Here am I!'"

Lloyd Quantrell was again convinced that the Smith family were

crazy.

As he recited this old bit of Scripture, with a slow, shrill, nasal cry, Isaac Smith folded his arms, closed his eyes, and dropped his

head upon his beard and breast, standing there a moment speechless, and his sons, also taking his attitude, looked to the ground as if all three were again to pray together.

"Here am I, Lord, on thy mountain!'" repeated Isaac Smith with rising inflection, unfolding his arms and stretching them wide. His strong jaws closed a moment, as he slowly turned his head, and with a steady eye, looking into Lloyd's, finished the sentence: "These were the words of Moses."

Some picture of Moses that Lloyd had seen, probably in the old Bible of his mother's family, was revived by the appearance of Isaac Smith at this moment. His nose would have been quite the Jew's, but that it came to an end too bluntly. His eyes, at spells, turned inward, like a lost thinker's, and his manner varied from the hard, practical American to the introspective, tranceful Oriental.

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The poor man is crazy on religious subjects," thought Lloyd Quantrell, "but how in the deuce did he get the military lunacy there too? Why, out of Moses, of course!

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So, General Smith," interrupted the young hunter, pleasantly, "that was the way Moses got his military commission? He was made a general in the bush?”.

"I was about to say, Mr. Quantrell, the general peace prevailing among many nations was broken-among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, and many others-who looked upon Moses, probably, as a sore disturber. They had not heard the voice he heard, nor seen the cause of war that lay among them. But in the deep prosperity of society often lies the live coal of war, as I have seen, at corn-harvest time, the fires break out in the woods and standing crops. One man might fail in this age—even one as obedient as Moses-to set in conflict the powers that now lie so tightly bound in cunning compromises that they can not draw back to strike each other. But the Power which sent the mysterious voice can bring the armies up, though the chosen captain look in vain to know how or where! He may excite only derision instead of war. He may be punished in a lunatic asylum. He may have the misery of utterly failing and involving others in destruction, but Moses thought all these things over, and they did not move him.” Lloyd Quantrell arose and whistled to his dog.

“General Smith,” he said, “myself and your two sons have been greatly edified. To meet a man of your travel and intelligence on the top of the mountain is a refreshing surprise, sir. But the sun is

getting low, and I have no shelter for the night. I would accept the hospitality of your house, if I knew just where it was."

"We are not going home, Mr. Quantrell," spoke one of the young men, "and there is nobody at our little cabin to entertain you. We are sorry, sir. You will do best to go down into the Catoctin Valley, here, where the settlements are close together. It is not very far to Middletown, where there is a tavern."

"Yes," said Isaac Smith, "we are out, Mr. Quantrell, on a night excursion, to hunt minerals in the mountain. I use the divining-rod, sir, with much success. We expect to find lead in these hills, or iron, at least."

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“Ah, General Smith, you have got a universal head there! So all-night luck to you, and good-by.-Come, Albion."

The dog started ahead at the cry.

God bless you, sir!" said Isaac Smith, taking Lloyd's hand in a large, fatherly palm. "Remember the queer old man's sermon on the mountain, and-never kill a dove again."

As the young man waved his hand and went on, he looked back once, and saw all three of the mountaineers watching him till he disappeared in the woods.

CHAPTER III.

SOME OLD DUTCH.

LLOYD QUANTRELL had still more than an hour of daylight; not enough to find his way back to Sandy Hook, where he had slept at the tavern, but abundant time to walk down the mountain into Catoctin or Middle Creek Valley.

He took the side-roads leading from the mountain pasture-lands, then crossed the steep fields, now stripped of their crops, and, finding plenty of chestnuts to fill his pockets, gnawed as he went along, and had a shot or two at some late-feeding partridges; and finally he jumped on a farmer's wagon, the farmer nodding assent pleasantly as he urged his horses, till, at a farm-gate near the creek, the wagon turned in.

Lloyd then jumped off and found himself at a covered bridge from which he could not see the white spires of Middletown. So he turned up a road at the creek's side, which looked cool and