Somewhere about noon, on a hot August day in the year 1757, a party of three was seated on a small pebbly beach at the bend of a little rivulet flowing from a spur of the Alleghanies into the Hudson River. It was a spot that, serving them now for shade, might have served equally well for concealment. Two huge elms spread leafy arms over the little bay, itself not a dozen yards across, and all around stretched the might forest, which, a hundred and fifty years ago, extended almost unbroken from the Hudson to the Ohio and the Missouri. The stream rippled musically over the pebbles, shining white in the sunlight: but the sward at the edge was shaded by the canopy of foliage, and there the three men lazily reposed.
Somewhere about noon, on a hot August day in the year 1757, a party of three was seated on a small pebbly beach at the bend of a little rivulet flowing from a spur of the Alleghanies into the Hudson River. It was a spot that, serving them now for shade, might have served equally well for concealment. Two huge elms spread leafy arms over the little bay, itself not a dozen yards across, and all around stretched the might forest, which, a hundred and fifty years ago, extended almost unbroken from the Hudson to the Ohio and the Missouri. The stream rippled musically over the pebbles, shining white in the sunlight: but the sward at the edge was shaded by the canopy of foliage, and there the three men lazily reposed.