if it prevailed, would be subversive of royal authority. So all officers coming to dispossess are violaters of law. Right and wrong are externally the same. We are not opposing you and your Government, but a party chiefly attorneys. We hear you applied to assembly for armed force to subdue us in vain. We choose Captain Stephen Fay and Mr. Jonas Fay, to treat with you in person. We entreat your aid to quiet us in our farms till the King decides it.[1] The embassy was successful. The council advised that all legal processes against Vermont should cease. If Bennington was happy in May over the invitation, Bennington was jubilant in August over the kindly advice. The air rang with shouts; the health of governor and council was drunk and cannon and small-arms were heard everywhere. No part of New York colony was happier or more devotedly British. Two years had passed since the New York Supreme Court had adjudged all the Vermont legal documents null and void: one year had passed since New York had sent a sheriff and posse with hundreds of citizens to force Vermont farmers from their farms, but both of these affairs occurred under Governor Clinton. Now perhaps, the Vermonters thought, the new governor was going to act fairly: there would be no more fights; no more watching and guarding against midnight attacks; no more need of fire-arms; and wives and babes would be safe. There would be no more kidnapping of Green Mountain Boys and hurrying them away to Albany jail; no more foreign surveying of the lands they tilled and loved. CHAPTER V. THE RAID UPON COLONEL REID'S SETTLERS.--ALLEN'S OUTLAWRY.--CREAN BRUSH.--PHILIP SKENE. But "best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley." While these negotiations were pending, New Yorkers were quietly doing the necessary work for stealing more Vermont lands. Cockburn, the Scotch New York surveyor, was surveying land along Otter Creek. The Green Mountain Boys heard of it, rallied, and overtook him near Vergennes, and found Colonel Reid's Scotchmen enjoying mills and farms. For three years these foreigners had been there. In 1769, with no legal title, they had found, seized, and enjoyed the land, with a mill. Vermonters had then rallied and dispossessed these dispossessors, but a second raid of Reid's men redispossessed them. In the summer of 1772, Vermont, seizing Cockburn, turned out Reid's tenants, broke up mill-stones and threw them over the falls, razed houses, and burned crops.