A RIDE FOR A BRIDE

When the story of bloodshed at Bunker Hill reached Bohemia Hall, in Cecil
County, Maryland, Albert De Courcy left his brother Ernest to support the
dignity of the house and make patriotic speeches, while he went to the
front, conscious that Helen Carmichael, his affianced wife, was watching,
in pride and sadness, the departure of his company. Letters came and
went, as they always do, until rumor came of a sore defeat to the
colonials at Long Island; then the letters ceased.

It was a year later when a ragged soldier, who had stopped at the hall
for supper, told of Albert's heroism in covering the retreat of
Washington. The gallant young officer had been shot, he said, as he
attempted to swim the morasses of Gowanus. But this soldier was in error.
Albert had been vexatiously bogged on the edge of the creek. While
floundering in the mud a half dozen sturdy red-coats had lugged him out
and he was packed off to the prison-ships anchored in the Wallabout. In
these dread hulks, amid darkness and miasma, living on scant, unwholesome
food, compelled to see his comrades die by dozens every day and their
bodies flung ashore where the tide lapped away the sand thrown over them,
De Courcy wished that death instead of capture had been his lot, for next
to his love he prized his liberty.

One day he was told off, with a handful of others, for transfer to a
stockade on the Delaware, and how his heart beat when he learned that the
new prison was within twenty miles of home! His flow of spirits returned,
and his new jailers liked him for his frankness and laughed at his honest
expletives against the king. He had the liberty of the enclosure, and was