“Only to be with you, only to please you, Richard.  I have no other happiness.”

“Then it is settled; and I thank Sir Jeffrey Amherst, for his words have made me feel ashamed of my indecision.  And look you, dear Kate, there shall be no more delays.  The earl buys Hyde as it stands; we have nothing except our personal effects to pack:  can you be ready in a week?”

“You are too impatient, Richard.  In a week it is impossible.

“Then in two weeks.  In short, my dear, I have taken an utter aversion to being longer in King George’s land.”

“Poor king!  Lady Swaffham says he means well; he misunderstands, he makes mistakes.”

“And political mistakes are crimes, Katherine.  Write to-night to your father.  Tell him that we are coming in two weeks to cast our lot with America.  Upon my honour, I am impatient to be away.”

When Joris Van Heemskirk received this letter, he was very much excited by its contents.  Putting aside his joy at the return of his beloved daughter, he perceived that the hour expected for years had really struck.  The true sympathy that had been so long in his heart, he must now boldly express; and this meant in all probability a rupture with most of his old associates and friends—­Elder Semple in the kirk, and the Matthews and Crugers and Baches in the council.

He was sitting in the calm evening, with unloosened buckles, in a cloud of fragrant tobacco, talking of these things.  “It is full time, come what will,” said Lysbet.  “Heard thou what Batavius said last night?”

“Little I listen to Batavius.”

“But this was a wise word.  ‘The colonists are leaving the old ship,’ he said; ‘and the first in the new boat will have the choice of oars.’”

“That was like Batavius, but I will take higher counsel than his.”

Then he rose, put on his hat, and walked down his garden; and, as he slowly paced between the beds of budding flowers, he thought of many things,—­the traditions of the past struggles for freedom, and the irritating wrongs that had imbittered his own experience for ten years.  There was plenty of life yet in the spirit his fathers had bequeathed to him; and, as this and that memory of wrong smote it, the soul-fire kindled, glowed, burned with passionate flame.  “Free, God gave us this fair land, and we will keep it free.  There has been in it no crowns and sceptres, no bloody Philips, no priestly courts of cruelty; and, in God’s name, we will have none!”

He was standing on the river-bank; and the meadows over it were green and fair to see, and the fresh wind blew into his soul a thought of its own untrammelled liberty.  He looked up and down the river, and lifted his face to the clear sky, and said aloud, “Beautiful land!  To be thy children we should not deserve, if one inch of thy soil we yielded to a tyrant.  Truly a vaderland to me and to mine thou hast been.  Truly do I love thee.”  And then, his soul being moved to its highest mark, he answered it tenderly, in the strong-syllabled mother-tongue that it knew so well,—­