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The Kull father, I regret to write, because it seems highly unpatriotic, had gone forth to catch fish that day, hugging up the thought close to his pocket of a heart, that the English fleet would pay well for fresh fish.

Now Sleet and Snow were treasures untold to Valentine and Anna Kull. Anna’s pocket-money, stored up to be spent once-a-year in New York, came to her hands by the sale of butter to oystermen; and the calf, Snow, was the exclusive property of her brother Valentine. No wonder they were striving to save their possessions–ignorant, children as they were, of every good which they could not see and feel.

Cow and calf, or rather calf and cow, never before were given such a race. Highways were ignored. There were not many beaten tracks at that time on Staten Island. Daisied and clovered fields the calf was dragged through; young corn and potato lots suffered alike by the pressure of hoof and foot. Anna nearly forgot her out-of-joint arm when the four reached the marsh. Its friendly-looking shelter was hailed with delight.

Said Valentine, tugging the tired calf, to Anna, switching forward the anxious cow: “I should like to see the riflemen from Pennsylvania and the Yankeys from Doodle or Dandy either, chase Sleet and Snow through this marsh.”

“It’s been awful work though to get ’em here,” said Anna, wiping her face with a pink handkerchief suddenly detached for use from her gown.

In plunged the boy and up s-s-cissed a cloud of mosquitoes, humming at the sound of the new-come feast; fresh flesh and blood from the uplands was desirable.

The grass was green, very green–lovely, bright, light green; the July sun shone down untiringly; the tide rushing up from Raritan Bay met the tide rolling over from Newark Bay, and the cool, sweet swash of water snaked along the stout sedge, making it sway and bend as though the wind were sweeping its tops.

When within the queer infolding, boy, cow, and calf had disappeared, Anna called: “I’ll run now and keep watch and tell you when the soldiers are gone.”

“No, you won’t !” shrieked back her brother; “you’ll stay here, and help me, or the skeeters will kill the critters. Bring me the biggest bush you can find, and fetch one for yourself.”

Anna always obeyed Valentine. It was a way she had. He liked it, and, generally speaking, she didn’t greatly dislike it, but her dress was thinner than his coat, and the happy mosquitoes knew she was fairer and sweeter than her Dutch brother, and didn’t mind telling her so in the most insinuating fashion possible. On this occasion, as she had in so many other unlike instances, she acceded to his request; toiling backward up the ascent and fetching thence an armful of the stoutest boughs she could twist from branches.

She neared the marsh on her return. All that she could discern was a straw hat bobbing hither and thither; the horns of a cow tossing to and fro; the tail of a cow lashing the air.

A voice she heard, shouting forth in impatient bursts of sound, “Anna, Anna Kull!”

” Here! I’m coming,” she responded.

“Hurry up! I’m eaten alive. Snow’s crazy and Sleet’s a lunatic,” shouted her brother, jerking the words forth between the vain dives his hand made into the cloud of wings in the air.

“Sakes alive!” said poor Anna, toiling from sedge bog to sedge bog with her burden of “bushes” and striving to hide her face from the mosquitoes as she went.

It was nearly noon-day then, and the Fourth of July too, but neither Valentine nor Anna thought of the day of the month. Why should they? The Nation wasn’t born yet whose hundredth birthday we keep this year.

The solemn assembly of earnest men–debating the to be or not to be of the United States–was over there at work in Congress Hall in the old State House. They were heated with sun and brick and argument; a hundred and ten British ships of war were anchoring and at anchor over on the ocean side of Staten Island. Up the bay, seven or eight thousand troops in “ragged regimentals” were working to make ready for battle; but not one of them all suffered more from sun and toil and anxiety and greed of blood than did the lad and the lass in the marsh.