familiar with the fort, offered to act as guide, and in a few minutes more the advance was begun, the two leaders at the head, Allen in command, Arnold as a volunteer.

The stockade was reached. A wicket stood open. Through this Allen charged followed by his men. A sentry posted there took aim, but his piece missed fire, and he ran back shouting the alarm. At his heels came the two leaders, at full speed, their men crowding after, till, before a man of the garrison appeared, the fort was fairly won.

Allen at once arranged his men so as to face each of the barracks. It was so early that most of those within were still asleep, and the fort was captured without the commander becoming aware that any thing unusual was going on. His whole command

was less than fifty men, and resistance would have been useless with double their number of stalwart mountaineers on the parade-ground.

Allen forced one of the sentries who had been captured to show him the way to the quarters of Captain Delaplace, the commander. Reaching the

chamber of the latter, the militia leader called on him in a stentorian voice to surrender. Delaplace sprang out of bed, and, half dressed, appeared with an alarmed and surprised face at the door.

"By whose authority?" he demanded, not yet alive to the situation.

"In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress !" roared out the Green Mountaineer.

Here was a demand which, backed as it was by a

drawn sword and the sound of shouts of triumph outside, it would have been madness to resist. The fort was surrendered with scarcely a shot fired or a blow exchanged, and its large stores of cannon and ammunition, then sorely needed by the colonists besieging Boston, fell into American hands. The stores and military material captured included a hundred and twenty pieces of cannon, with a considerable number of small arms and other munitions of high value to the patriot cause.

While these events were taking place, Colonel Seth Warner was bringing the rear-guard across the lake, and was immediately sent with a hundred men to take possession of the fort at Crown Point, in which were only a sergeant and twelve men. This was done without difficulty, and a hundred more cannon captured.

The dispute between Arnold and Allen was now renewed, Massachusetts supporting the one, Connecticut the other. While it was being settled, the two joined in an expedition together, with the purpose of gaining full possession of Lake Champlain, and seizing the town of St. Johns, at its head. This failed, reinforcements having been sent from Montreal, and the adventurers returned to Ticonderoga, contenting themselves for the time being with their signal success in that quarter, and the fame on which they counted from their daring exploit.

The after-career of Ethan Allen was an interesting one, and worthy of being briefly sketched. Having taken Ticonderoga, he grew warm with the desire to take Canada, and, on September 25, 1775, made a

rash assault on Montreal with an inadequate body of men. The support he hoped for was not forthcoming, and he and his little band were taken, Allen, soon after, being sent in chains to England.

Here he attracted much attention, his striking form, his ardent patriotism, his defiance of the English, even in captivity, and certain eccentricities of his manner and character interesting some and angering others of those with whom he had inter

course.

Afterwards he was sent back to America and held prisoner at Halifax and New York, in jails and prison-ships, being most of the time harshly treated and kept heavily ironed. He was released in 1778.

...

A fellow-prisoner, Alexander Graydon, has left in his memoirs a sketch of Allen, which gives us an excellent idea of the man. "His figure was that of a robust, large-framed man worn down by confinement and hard fare. His style was a singular compound of local barbarisms, scriptural phrases, and Oriental wildness. . . . Notwithstanding that Allen might have had something of the insubordinate, lawless, frontier spirit in his composition, he appeared to me to be a man of generosity and honor."

Among the eccentricities of the man was a disbelief in Christianity,-much more of an anomaly in that day than at present, and a belief in the transmigration of souls, it being one of his fancies that, after death, his spirituai part was to return to this world in the form of a large white horse.

On his release he did not join the army. Vermont had declared itself an independent State in 1777, and

sought admittance to the Confederation. This New

York opposed. Allen took up the cause, visited Congress on the subject, but found its members not inclined to offend the powerful State of New York. There was danger of civil war in the midst of the war for independence, and the English leaders, seeing the state of affairs, tried to persuade Allen and the other Green Mountain leaders to declare for the authority of the king. They evidently did not know Ethan Allen. He was far too sound a patriot to entertain for a moment such a thought. The letters received by him he sent in 1782 to Congress, and when the war ended Vermont was a part of the Union, though not admitted as a State till 1791. Allen was then dead, having been carried away suddenly by apoplexy in 1789.

THE BRITISH AT NEW YORK.

BEFORE the days of dynamite and the other powerful explosives which enable modern man to set at naught the most rigid conditions of nature, warfare with the torpedo was little thought of, gunpowder being a comparatively innocent agent for this purpose. In the second period of the Revolutionary War, when the British fleet had left Boston and appeared in the harbor of New York, preparatory to an attack on the latter city, the only methods devised by the Americans for protection of the Hudson were sunken hulks in the stream, chevaux-de-frise, composed of anchored logs, and fire-ships prepared to float down on the foe. All these proved of no avail. The current loosened the anchored logs, so that they proved useless; the fire-ships did no damage; and the batteries on shore were not able to hinder certain ships of the enemy from running the gantlet of the city, and ascending the Hudson to Tappan Sea, forty miles above. All the service done by the fire-ships was to alarm the captains of these bold cruisers, and induce them to run down the river again, and rejoin the fleet at the Narrows.

It was at this juncture that an interesting event took place, the first instance on record of the use of

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