“How can you turn a horse in this knitting-needle of a lane?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” replied Halicarnassus, dubiously, “unless I take him up in my arms, and set him down with his head the other way,”—­and immediately turned him deftly in a corner about half as large as the wagon.

The next lane we came to was the right one, and being narrow, rocky, and rough, we left our carriage and walked.

A whole volume of the peaceful and prosperous history of our beloved country could be read in the fact that the once belligerent, life-saving, death-dealing fort was represented by a hen-coop; yet I was disappointed.  I was hungry for a ruin,—­some visible hint of the past.  Such is human nature,—­ever prone to be more impressed by a disappointment of its own momentary gratification than by the most obvious well-being of a nation; but, glad or sorry, of Fort Edward was not left one stone upon another.  Several single stones lay about promiscuous rather than belligerent.  Flag-staff and palisades lived only in a few straggling bean-poles.  For the heavy booming of cannon rose the “quauk!” of ducks and the cackling of hens.  We went to the spot which tradition points out as the place where Jane McCrea met her death.  River flowed, and raftsmen sang below; women stood at their washing-tubs, and white-headed children stared at us from above; nor from the unheeding river or the forgetful woods came shriek or cry or faintest wail of pain.

When we were little, and geography and history were but printed words on white paper, not places and events, Jane McCrea was to us no suffering woman, but a picture of a low-necked, long-skirted, scanty dress, long hair grasped by a half-naked Indian, and two unnatural-looking hands raised in entreaty.  It was interesting as a picture, but it excited no pity, no horror, because it was only a picture.  We never saw women dressed in that style.  We knew that women did not take journeys through woods without bonnet or shawl, and we spread a veil of ignorant, indifferent incredulity over the whole.  But as we grow up, printed words take on new life.  The latent fire in them lights up and glows.  The mystic words throb with vital heat, and burn down into our souls to an answering fire.  As we stand, on this soft summer day, by the old tree which tradition declares to have witnessed that fateful scene, we go back into a summer long ago, but fair and just like this.  Jane McCrea is no longer a myth, but a young girl blooming and beautiful with the roses of her seventeen years.  Farther back still, we see an old man’s darling, little Jenny of the Manse, a light-hearted child, with sturdy Scotch blood leaping in her young veins,—­then a tender orphan, sheltered by a brother’s care,—­then a gentle maiden, light-hearted no longer, heavy-freighted, rather, but with a priceless burden,—­a happy girl, to whom love calls with stronger voice than brother’s blood, stronger even than life.  Yonder in the woods lurk wily and wary foes.