of his day--grievous drunkenness. The gathering of Indians at Oswego under
Claus and Brant was larger than the first reports had made it. The regular
troops, both British and German, intended for our destruction, were said
to alone outnumber the whole militia force which we could hope to oppose
to them. But most of all we thought of the hundreds of our old Tory
neighbors, who were bringing this army down upon us to avenge their own
fancied wrongs; and when we thought of them we moodily rattled the bullets
in our deerskin bags, and bent the steel more fiercely upon the whirling,
hissing stone.

I have read much of war, both ancient and modern. I declare solemnly that
in no chronicle of warfare in any country, whether it be of great
campaigns like those of Marlborough and the late King of Prussia, and that
strange Buonaparte, half god, half devil, who has now been caged at last
at St. Helena; of brutal invasions by a foreign enemy, as when the French
overran and desolated the Palatinate; or of buccaneering and piratical
enterprise by the Spaniards and Portuguese; or of the fighting of savages
or of the Don Cossacks--in none of these records, I aver, can you find so
much wanton baseness and beast-like bloodthirstiness as these native-born
Tories showed toward us. Mankind has not been capable of more utter
cruelty and wickedness than were in their hearts. Beside them the lowest
painted heathen in their train was a Christian, the most ignorant Hessian
peasant was a nobleman.

Ever since my talk with Colonel Dayton I had been trying to look upon
these Tories as men who, however mistaken, were acting from a sense of
duty. For a full year it seemed as if I had succeeded; indeed, more than
once, so temperately did I bring myself in my new philosophy to think of
them, I was warned by my elders that it would be better for me to keep my
generous notions to myself. But now, when the stress came, all this