A Loyal Lass by Amy Ella Blanchard — Read

_War Clouds_

It was getting dark in the woods which ran along above the deep gorge through which whirled and rushed the waters of the Niagara River, and Marianne Reyburn unconsciously hurried her steps; for, though a frontier lass and fearless to a degree, she was alive to the dangers which lay hidden in the forest, and at this particular time she felt a new apprehension, for there were mutterings of a war with England, and that meant -- what, she hardly knew. It might include other dangers beside the Indian horrors of which her grandmother was always ready to tell her. Those tales of the early settlements, of the days of Frontenac, of the Seven Years' War, and of the "Hungry Year," were what had fed her childhood's fancy, and even now she listened to them with wide-open eyes and parted lips. Canadian was this grandmother, and it was Marianne's father who had come up out of the south with his parents. Marianne liked to hear him tell how they left their Kentucky home in an emigrant wagon to settle in Ohio, and how a few years later her father, a young man of adventurous turn, had followed along the great lakes till he found him a wife on the borders of Ontario, and had finally made him a home near the little village of Lewiston.