fully occupied, and the hospitable mansion, as was usual on all public occasions, overflowed. There the general, his aid-de-camps, the sachems, and the principal officers of the colonel's regiment, were received; and those who could not find room there of the next class, were accommodated by Peter and Jeremiah. On the common was an Indian encampment: and the barn and orchard were full of the provincials. All these last brought as usual their own food; but were supplied by this liberal family with every production of the garden, dairy, and orchard. While the colonel's judgment was exercised in the necessary regulations for this untried warfare, Mrs. Schuyler, by the calm fortitude she displayed in this trying exigence, by the good sense and good breeding with which she accommodated her numerous and various guests, and by those judicious attentions to family concerns, which, producing order and regularity through every department without visible bustle and anxiety, enable the mistress of a family to add family to add grace and ease to hospitality, showed herself worthy of her distinguished lot.

Chapter XX

A REFRACTORY WARRIOR THE SPIRIT PER

VADING THE NEW ENGLAND PROVINCES

WHI

HILE these preparations were going on, the general [Gov. Shirley] was making every effort of the neighborhood to urge those who had promised assistance, to come forward with their allotted quotas.

On the other side of the river, not very far from the Flats, lived a person whom I shall not name; though his conduct was so peculiar and characteristic of the times, that his anti-heroism is on that sole account worth mentioning. This person lived in great security and abundance, in a place like an earthly paradise, and scarcely knew what it was to have an ungratified wish, having had considerable wealth left to him; and from the simple and domestic habits of his life, had formed no desires beyond it, unless indeed it were the desire of being

1 The courage, ability and energy of Gov. Shirley were not eminently appreciated in New York. Yet his acts are abundantly recorded in the volumes of the documentary history of that colony. He has found an ardent vindicator in Samuel G. Drake, in the "Particular History of the French and Indian War" (1870), in which his civil and military services are set forth advantageously, and he is characterized as one of the ablest of the colonial governors.

thought a brave man, which seemed his greatest ambition he was strong, robust, and an excellent marksman; talked loud, looked fierce, and always expressed the utmost scorn and detestation of cowardice. The colonel applied to him, that his name, and the names of such adherents as he could bring, might be set down in the list of those who were to bring their quota, against a given time, for the general defence; with the request he complied. When the rendezvous came on, this talking warrior had changed his mind, and absolutely refused to appear; the general sent for him, and warmly expostulated on his breach of promise; the bad example, and the disarrangement of plan which it occasioned: the culprit spoke in a high tone, saying, very truly "that the general was possessed of no legal means of coercion; that every one went or staid as they chose; and that his change of opinion on that subject rendered him liable to no penalty whatever.” Tired of this sophistry, the enraged general had recourse to club law; and seizing a cudgel, belabored this recreant knight most manfully; while several Indian sachems, and many of his own countrymen and friends, coolly stood by; for the colonel's noted common was the scene of his assault. Our poor neighbor (as he long after became) suffered this dreadful bastinado, unaided and unpitied; and this example, and the subsequent contempt under which he labored (for he was ever after styled captain, and he did not refuse the title), was said to

have an excellent effect in preventing such retrograde motions in subsequent campaigns.1 The provincial troops, aided by the faithful Mohawks, performed their duty with great spirit and perseverance. They were, indeed, very superior to the ignorant, obstinate, and mean-souled beings, who, in after times, brought the very name of provincial troops into discredit; and were actuated by no single motive but that of avoiding the legal penalty then affixed to disobedience, and enjoying the pay and provisions allotted to them by the province or the mother country, I cannot exactly say which. Afterwards, when the refuse of mankind were selected, like Falstaff's soldiers, and raised much in the same way, the New York troops still maintained their respectability. This superiority might, without reproaching others, be in some measure accounted for from incidental causes. The four New England provinces were much earlier

1 Above thirty years after, when the writer of these pages lived with her family at the Flats, the hero of this little tale used very frequently to visit her father, a veteran officer; and being a great talker, war and politics were his incessant topics. There was no campaign or expedition proposed but what he censured and decided on; proposing methods of his own, by which they might have been much better conducted; in short Parolles with his drum was a mere type of our neighbor. Her father long wondered how kindly he took to him, and how a person of so much wealth and eloquence should dwell so obscurely, and shun all the duties of public life; till at length we discovered that he still loved to talk arrogantly of war and public affairs, and pitched upon him for a listener, as the only person he could suppose ignorant of his disgrace. Such is human nature! and so incurable is human vanity!! — Mrs. Grant.

settled, assumed sooner the forms of a civil community, and lived within narrower bounds; they were more laborious; their fanaticism, which they brought from England in its utmost fervor, long continued its effervescence, where there were no pleasures, or indeed lucrative pursuits, to detach their mind from it, and long after that genuine spirit of piety, which, however narrowed and disfigured, was still sincere, had in a great measure evaporated; enough of the pride and rigor of bigotry remained to make them detest and despise the Indian tribes, as ignorant heathen savages. The tribes, indeed, who inhabited their district, had been so weakened by an unsuccessful warfare with the Mohawks, and were so every way inferior to them, that after the first establishment of the colony, and a few feeble attacks successfully repulsed, they were no longer enemies to be dreaded, or friends to be courted. This had an unhappy effect with regard to those provinces; and to the different relations in which they stood with respect to the Indian, some part of the striking difference in the moral and military character of these various establishments must be attributed.

The people of New England left the mother country, as banished from it by what they considered oppression; came over foaming with religious and political fury, and narrowly missed having the most artful and able of demagogues, Cromwell himself, for their leader and guide. They might be