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“Mother,” said Mr. Porter, “I had to do the grinding myself–couldn’t find a man to do it, and I knew it couldn’t be done here to-day, water’s too low. Where are the boys?” he questioned, as he entered and looked around. When informed, his sole ejaculation was, “I ought to have known that boys always have gone and always will go after soldiers.”

“Don’t worry, mother,” he added to his wife, as she stood looking wistfully down the road.

There were tears in her eyes as she said: “Not a boy left.”

“Why yes, mother, here comes Stephen and Stiles Hotchkiss up the road. My! how tired and hot the boys and the horses do look!” exclaimed Polly.

Stephen waited for no reprimand. He forestalled it by saying: “Captain Hotchkiss let Stiles and me go far enough to see the British troops–way off, ever so far–but we saw ’em, we did, didn’t we, Stiles?”

“Come! come!” said Mr. Porter, while the lad’s mother stood with her hand on his head. “Stephen, tell us all about it!”

“Captain Hotchkiss said he was a boy once, and if we’d promise him to go home the minute he told us to, he’d take us along. Well! we kept meeting folks running away from New Haven, with everything on ’em but their heads. One woman was lugging a lot of salt pork, ‘because she couldn’t bear to have the Britishers eat it all up;’ and another woman was carrying away a lot of candles hanging by a string, and the sun had melted the last drop of tallow, leaving the wicks dangling against the tallow on her dress, but she didn’t know it; and mother, would you believe it–Mr. Timothy Atwater told Captain Hotchkiss that he met a woman whom he knew hurrying out of town with a cat in her arms. When he asked her where her children were, she said, ‘Why, at home I suppose.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Atwater, ‘hadn’t you better leave the cat and go back and get them?’ And she said, ‘Perhaps she had,’ and went back for ’em.”

“What became of the cat?” asked Mrs. Melicent Porter.

“Why, Aunt Melicent, how nice!” cried Stephen, running back to the porch and returning with a cat in his arms.

“I’ve fetched her to you. I knew you loved cats so! Here she is, black as ink, and she stuck to the saddle every step of the way like a true soldier’s cat. I was afraid she’d run away when I took her off the saddle, and I hid her. You know mother don’t like cats around under her feet.”

In a minute pussy was on the floor, and the last drop of milk in the house was set before her by little Polly Lewis. Little Melicent cooed softly to her, while Stephen and Stiles went on with their story,–from which it was learned that the boys had gone within a mile of Hotchkisstown (now Westville), where, from a height, they had a view of the British troops. The lads were filled with admiration of the marching, “as though it was all one motion,” of the “mingling colors of the uniforms worn, as the bright red of the English Foot Guards blended with the graver hues of the dress worn by the German mercenaries,” and of “the waving line of glittering bayonets.”

“We didn’t see,” said Stephen, “but just one flash of musketry, because Stiles’s father said we must start that instant for home, and he told Stiles to stay here until morning, and we haven’t had a mouthful to eat since breakfast, and its been the hottest day that ever was, and I’m tired to death.”

“And the cows are on the hill and nobody here to fetch them down,” sighed Mr. Porter.

“Such a lot of captains waiting to see you, father!” announced Polly. “There’s Captain Woodruff and Captain Castle and Captain Richards and a Fenn captain and a Garnsey captain. I forget the rest.” The captains invaded the kitchen itself, declaring that it being Monday in the week, every householder had been short of provisions for the emergency–that every inn on the way and many a private house had been unable to provide enough for so many men, and what could they have at the Porter Inn?