Marion's Faith Author:Charles King Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HEROINES. "what is so rare as a day in June?" sings the poet, and where can a day in June be more beautiful than at this Highland Grate of the... more » peerless Hudson? It is June of the Centennial year, and all the land ia ablaze with patriotic fervor. From North, from South, from East and West, the products of a nation's ingenuity or a nation's toil have been garnered in one vast exhibition at the Quaker City; and thither flock the thousands of our people. It is June of a presidential nomination, and the eyes of statesmen and politicians are fixed on Cincinnati. It is the celebration of the first century of a nation's life that engrosses the thoughts of millions of hearts, and between that great jubilee and that quadrennial tempest-in-a-teapot, the nomination, who but a few lonely wives and children have time to think of those three columns far, far out in the broad Northwest,—those three columns of regulars, cavalry and infantry, rough-garbed, bronzed and bearded, steadily closing in towards the wild and beautiful region along the northern water-shed of the Big Horn Range, where ten thousand hostile Indians are uneasily watching their coming ? On the Atlantic seaboard comrades in full-dress uniform, with polished arms, are standing guard over government treasures on exhibition, and thoughtless thousands wonder at the easeand luxury of the soldier's life. Out on the frontier, in buckskin and flannel, slouch hats and leggings, and bristling prairie-belts, the little army is concentrating upon an outnumbering foe, whose signal-fires light the way by night, whose trail is red with blood by day. From the northeast, up the Yellowstone, Terry of Fort Fisher fame, the genial, the warm-hearted general, whose thoughts are ever with his officers and men, leads his few hundred fo...« less