Mysteries of the missing

Late on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June, 1874, two men in a shabby-covered buggy stopped their horse under the venerable elms of Washington Lane in Germantown, that sleepy suburb of Philadelphia, with its grave-faced revolutionary houses and its air of lavendered maturity. All about these intruders was historic ground. Near at hand was the Chew House, where Lord Howe repulsed Washington and his tattered command in their famous encounter. Yonder stood the old Morris Mansion, where the British commander stood cursing the fog, while his troops retreated from the surprise attack. Here the impetuous Agnew fell before a backwoods rifleman, and there Mad Anthony Wayne was forced to decamp by the fire of his confused left. Not far away the first American Bible had been printed, and that ruinous house on the ridge had once been the American Capitol. The whole region was a hive of memories.
Strangely enough, the men in the buggy gave no sign of interest in all these things. Instead, they devoted their attention to the two young sons of a grocer who happened to be playing among the bushes on their father's property. The children were gradually attracted to confidence by the strangers, who offered them sweets and asked them who they were, where their parents were staying, how old they might be, and how they might like to go riding.