[Gutenberg 36744] • Peggy Owen at Yorktown

It was a fine winter day. There had been a week of murky skies and dripping boughs; a week of rain, and mud, and slush; a week of such disagreeable weather that when the citizens of Philadelphia awoke, on this twenty-first day of February, to find the sun shining in a sky of almost cloudless blue and the air keen and invigorating, they rejoiced, and went about their daily tasks thrilled anew with the pleasure of living. About ten o'clock on the morning of this sunlit winter day a young girl was slowly wending her way up Chestnut Street. At every few steps she was obliged to pause to lift into place a huge bundle she was carrying-a bundle so large that she could just reach her arms about it, and clasp her hands together in the comfortable depths of a great muff. A ripple of laughter rose to her lips as, in spite of her efforts, the bundle at length slipped through her arms and fell with a soft thud upon the frozen ground.