In an hour or more the force of the wind somewhat abated, but the sky
seemed to dissolve into a massy flood. The rain rushed down, not in
drops, but in sheets, and in spite of his cloak, he was wet to the skin.
For half an hour he was obliged to halt in the wood between Old Kennett
and Chadd's Ford, and here he made the discovery that with all his care
the holsters were nearly full of water. Brown streams careered down the
long, meadowy hollow on his left, wherein many Hessian soldiers lay
buried. There was money buried with them, the people believed, but no
one cared to dig among the dead at midnight, and many a wild tale of
frighted treasure-seekers recurred to his mind.

At the bottom of the long hill flowed the Brandywine, now rolling swift
and turbid, level with its banks. Roger bravely breasted the flood, and
after a little struggle, reached the opposite side. Then across the
battle-meadow, in the teeth of the storm, along the foot of the low
hill, around the brow of which the entrenchments of the American army
made a clayey streak, until the ill-fated field, sown with grape-shot
and bullets which the farmers turned up every spring with their furrows,
lay behind him. The story of the day was familiar to him, from the
narratives of scores of eye-witnesses, and he thought to himself, as he
rode onward, wet, lashed by the furious rain, yet still of good
cheer,--"Though the fight was lost, the cause was won."

After leaving the lovely lateral valley which stretches eastward for two
miles, at right angles to the course of the Brandywine, he entered a
rougher and wilder region, more thickly wooded and deeply indented with
abrupt glens. Thus far he had not met with a living soul. Chester was
now not more than eight or ten miles distant, and, as nearly as he could
guess, it was about two o'clock in the afternoon. With the best luck, he