A stirring story of young American courage, by a writer who knows how to make history live. A deeply moving tale of a small boy, his younger sister and mother, and an antique matchlock gun, the story happens to be a true one.

The lullaby which Gertrude Van Alstyne sings to her children to make them forget the threats of the Indians is an old Dutch song, which many mothers sang to their children up and down the Hudson Valley in 1756, when New York State was still a British colony and the French and Indians were raiding homes all the way to Guilderland, just outside of Albany City.

The Van Alstynes were real people. Teunis, the sturdy Dutch father was summoned to watch for marauding Indians. Before leaving home, he took down from the wall the great Spanish gun, heritage of the Palatine mother of the family. This gun had already seen service in the cause of freedom. It was to serve again. Although the huge matchlock fun was too heavy for young Edward to manage along, he was proud that his father had handed it over to him—and with it the protection of his mother and sister. The Indians did come, creeping through the dusk, and Gertrude Van Alstyne went bravely out to meet them and Edward played his own courageous part in saving this typical American family.

Walter Edmonds says of his historical writings—"I want my readers to get out of my books a sense of the relation of history to the present day. History is often taught as a study of dead things and people; or else, and worse, from the debunking angle. What I want to show are the qualities of mind and spirit of plain, ordinary people, who after all carry the burden of human progress. I want to know about people, how they lived, what they hoped for, what they feared. I want to know what it was like to be born into this time or that, and what a man left behind when he died."

So Walter Edmonds show American boys and girls the brave heritage which young Edward Van Alstyne left behind for them to carry on. The story is Walter Edmonds' first for children. Paul Lantz, whose work appears in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has made over forty lithographic drawings for THE MATCHLOCK FUN, some in four colors, others in richly-toned black.

From the dust jacket