John Andre of the British army is remembered by us chiefly because he was hanged as a spy during the Revolutionary War. It is a rule of warfare that a spy is put to death if he is caught.
But though he had a fair trial, and his death was justified, Major Andre merely paid with his life for serving the army in which he was an officer, as any soldier does who is killed in battle. George Washington himself called Major Andre "unfortunate,'' and the British made a hero of him and built a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
Andre was connected with the treachery of the American general Benedict Arnold, about whom there is a separate article in this volume. General Arnold had offered to deliver to the British the plans of the American fortress at West Point. He handed these plans to Major Andre, who was caught with the plans in his boots. The three American soldiers who captured him took him to George Washington's headquarters at Tappan, in Rockland County, New York State, on the west bank of the Hudson River not many miles north of New York City.
There he was tried by a board of American generals and sentenced to death. John Andre was a British officer but came of a Swiss family and was educated in Geneva, Switzerland. He had great talent for painting and writing poetry. He was born in 1751, and was 29 years old when he was hanged on October 2, 1780.
Spiders In The Garden
Watching for their prey in the centre of a radiating geometrical snare, we often find the garden spiders. The beauty of their vertical orb-webs and the large size of these strikingly marked creatures always attract our attention during summer strolls.
Jack & Jill The Vulture Twins
Probably this story of Jack and Jill, the Vulture Twins, would never have been written, if Betsy, Farmer Parsons' old brindle cow, had not refused to come up from the woods one night. But she wouldn't come, so Farmer Parsons had to go down after her.
At Home With Mr. Burroughs
Youth still peered out at me in spite of his crowning thatch of silvery hair when I first met John Burroughs in 1904. As we walked together on our way to his rustic little house in the woods called "Slab-sides,"
