"Court. Was you at the Serjeant's Arms on the 21st of May? Did you hear
any thing of this nature?

"Savage. I did, and nearly as the last evidence has declared; the society
in general refused to be concerned in it, and thought it a mad scheme.

"Mr. Abeel. Pray, Mr. Savage, have not you heard nothing of an information
that was to be given to Governor Tryon?

"Savage. Yes; papers and letters were at different times shewn to the
society, which were taken out of General Washington's pockets by Mrs.
Gibbons, and given (as she pretended some occasion of going out) to Mr.
Clayford, who always copied them, and they were put into his pockets
again."


The authenticity of this pamphlet thus becomes of importance, and over
this little time need be spent. The committee named in it differs from the
committee really named by the Provincial Congress, and the proceedings
nowhere implicate the men actually proved guilty. In other words, the
whole publication is a clumsy Tory forgery, put forward with the same idle
story of "captured papers" employed in the "spurious letters" of
Washington, and sent forth from the same press (J. Bew) from which that
forgery and several others issued.

The source from which the English fabricator drew this scandal is
fortunately known. In 1775 a letter to Washington from his friend Benjamin
Harrison was intercepted by the British, and at once printed broadcast in
the newspapers. In this the writer gossips to Washington "to amuse you and