estate than the others' niggers. Here were posted thick in the roll-call
such names as Fonda, Starin, Yates, Sammons, Gardenier, and Wemple. Many
of the officers, and some few of the men, had rough imitations of uniform,
such as home-made materials and craft could command, but these varied
largely in style and color. The great majority of the privates wore simply
their farm homespun, gray and patched, and some had not even their
hat-brims turned up with a cockade. But they had a look on their
sunburned, gnarled, and honest faces which the Butlers and Johnsons might
well have shrunk from.

These men of the Mohawk district spoke more Dutch than anything else,
though there were both English and High German tongues among them. They
had more old acquaintances among the Tories than had their Palatine
friends up the river, for this had been the Johnsons' own district. Hence,
though in numbers we were smaller than the regiments that mustered above
at Stone Arabia and Zimmerman's, at Canajoharie and Cherry Valley, we were
richer in hate.

At daybreak on August 2, the remaining companies of this regiment were to
start on their march up the Valley. I rode home to my mother's house late
in the afternoon of the 1st, to spend what might be a last night under her
roof. On the morrow, Samson Sammons and Jelles Fonda, members of the
Committee of Safety, and I, could easily overtake the column on
our horses.

I was greatly perplexed and unsettled in mind about Daisy and my duty
toward her, and, though I turned this over in my thoughts the whole
distance, I could come to no satisfactory conclusion. On the one hand, I
yearned to go and say farewell to her; on the other, it was not clear,
after that letter of her husband's, that I could do this without unjustly