Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/195

  some of the proud traditions ingrained by years of bitter struggle, what place could be a more fitting haunt of dreams and nursery of imagination? Here, on these wind-swept slopes where now the summer air carries the sweetness of fresh-cut hay, here in this vale of humiliation men met the arrows of despair. There is an old belief that it is the second summer that is the danger time in a baby's life. It was the second winter that was the cradle-crisis of the young republic—the winter of 1777-78. It was then that began the long road that carries us from Valley Forge to Versailles.

Few of us realize, I think, what a vast national shrine Valley Forge has become under the careful hands of a few devoted people. There is little of winter and dearth in that spreading park as one views it on a July afternoon. In the great valley of the Schuylkill green acres of young corn ripple in the breeze. Sunlight and shadow drift across the hillsides as great rafts of cloud swim down unseen channels of the wind. There is no country in America lovelier than those quiet hills and vales of Montgomery and Chester counties, with their shadowed creeks, their plump orchards and old stone farmhouses. My idea of jovial destiny would be to be turned loose (about the beginning of the scrapple season) somewhere in the neighborhood of the King of Prussia—no one but an idiot will ever call him by his new name of Ye Old King!—with a knapsack of tobacco, a knobby stick and a volume of R. L. S.