Page:Lynch Williams--The girl and the game.djvu/81



autumn night about a decade ago, in the quiet village of Princeton, a party of bold young men might have been seen wending their way stealthily westward along the broad, though wavering, line that marks the route by which in former days the stage-coaches were wont to rumble back and forth between New York and Philadelphia.

Passing the silent shops, whose blinds had long since been drawn and doors bolted for the night, the little band soon found itself in the neighborhood of homes, some placed at a distance from the street, with shrubbery and dark trees intervening, and others pressing close to the sidewalk—but all of their dark and silent, bespeaking well-earned rest and repose.

Now the midnight travellers proceeded