realise that in less than a twelve-month thou 'lt be a girl of
eighteen and without a lover, much less a husband? I was wed
before I was seventeen, and so are all respectably behaved
females. See what elopements come to. 'T is evident thou 'rt
to die an old maid."


XXII
THE OLIVE BRANCH

If this year was bare of courtships, of affairs of interest it
was far otherwise. Scarcely was 1776 ushered in than
news came that the raw and ill-equipped force, which
for nine months had held the British beleaguered in
Boston, had at last obtained sufficient guns and powder to assume
the offensive, and had, by seizing Dorchester Heights,
compelled the evacuation of the city. Howe's army and the
fleet sailed away without molestation to Halifax, leaving behind
them a rumour, however, that great reinforcements were
coming from Great Britain, and that upon their arrival, New
York would be reduced and held as a strategic base from
which all the middle colonies would be overrun and reduced
to submission.

This probability turned military operations southward. General
Lee, who early in the new year had been given command
of the district around Manhattan Island, set about a system of
fortifications, even while he protested that the water approaches
made the city impossible to hold against such a naval force as
Britain was certain to employ. At the same time that this