Chapter I.

"The French Are in the Valley!"



It may easily be that, during the many years which have come and gone
since the eventful time of my childhood, Memory has played tricks upon me
to the prejudice of Truth. I am indeed admonished of this by study of my
son, for whose children in turn this tale is indited, and who is now able
to remember many incidents of his youth--chiefly beatings and like
parental cruelties--which I know very well never happened at all. He is
good enough to forgive me these mythical stripes and bufferings, but he
nurses their memory with ostentatious and increasingly succinct
recollection, whereas for my own part, and for his mother's, our enduring
fear was lest we had spoiled him through weak fondness. By good fortune
the reverse has been true. He is grown into a man of whom any parents
might be proud--tall, well-featured, strong, tolerably learned, honorable,
and of influence among his fellows. His affection for us, too, is very
great. Yet in the fashion of this new generation, which speaks without
waiting to be addressed, and does not scruple to instruct on all subjects
its elders, he will have it that he feared me when a lad--and with cause!
If fancy can so distort impressions within such short span, it does not
become me to be too set about events which come back slowly through the
mist and darkness of nearly threescore years.

Yet they return to me so full of color, and cut in such precision and
keenness of outline, that at no point can I bring myself to say, "Perhaps
I am in error concerning this," or to ask, "Has this perchance been