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Sally Wister: A Girl Of The American Revolution
by
“Dr. Gould came here to-night. Our army are about six miles off, on their march to the Jerseys.”
On the next day she adds, “The army began their march at six this morning. Our brave, our heroic General Washington was escorted by fifty of the Life Guards with drawn swords. Each day he acquires an addition to his goodness.”
A fine tribute, indeed, to the moving spirit of American Independence, and with it let us close Sally Wister’s journal, sure that with the retreat of the British from Philadelphia, she will soon be able to return to the friends from whom she has had such a long separation, and so will have no further need to record happenings at the farm as she has been doing so faithfully, but can presently relate them not to Debby alone, but to the whole “Social Circle,” and we may be sure from what we know of Mistress Sally that her stories will lose no spice in the telling.
If there are those who are reluctant to part with pretty Sally, let them turn to the little journal and read it in its spicy entirety for themselves, and it were well also after reading this chronicle of a girl of the Revolution, to turn to the pages of history and paint in more accurate detail the background of our vivid picture of Sally, for only a short distance from the farm, across the hills of Gwynedd, the greatest actors in the Revolutionary drama were playing their parts–Washington, Lafayette, Wayne, Steuben, Greene, and many others–playing the hero’s part at the battle of Germantown, at the battle of Burgoyne, in the skirmishes before Washington’s encampment at Whitemarsh, suffering silently in a winter at Valley Forge.
Turn to the pages of history for the sombre background and glance once again at the piquant face and merry eyes of Sally Wister, half hidden under her demure Quaker bonnet, with her snowy kerchief crossed so smoothly over her tempestuous young heart, as she looked when soldiers and officers fell under the charm of her bewitching personality!