"The letter you favoured me with gives me, at last, an opportunity of congratulating you upon your marriage. I am very sensible it is a state which must be attended by extraordinary expenses, and wish it was in my power to enable you, with perfect ease, to defray them. I would even adopt the mode you propose, of appointing you Quartermaster, if I thought the good of the service required; but as it does not appear to me necessary for every detached company to have a staff annexed to it, I am sure you will have the goodness to excuse my incurring any extraordinary charges upon Government which I could not properly justify. "I am, with regard, &c., &c." Another letter which the General had written was to a friend at Woolwich, who superintended the recruiting for the Battalion, which was then much below its establishment. In answer to repeated remonstrances, a few handfuls of men from the other Battalions were sent,—not the best, it is to be feared, if human nature then were like human nature now; and, at last, recruits being no longer obtainable in England, the experiment was tried of recruiting in Ireland, and the first draft was sent to the 4th Battalion. At this time the Irish Artillery, afterwards the 7th Battalion of the Royal Artillery, enjoyed a separate existence, and secured the best recruits in Ireland. The refuse only remained for the Royal Artillery, and the following is the graphic language used by the gallant General in describing the new levies as they landed in New York. "The drafts have arrived, four having deserted, and one died upon the passage. I should not have been very much afflicted if many of those who landed here had saved me, either by death or desertion, the pain of looking at them, for such warriors of 5 feet 5½ inches I never saw raised before for the service of Artillery.... I presume the reason why so few stand of arms accompanied them was the consideration of these whippers-in and postilions of fellows being unable to bear them: but I must try how far the strength of these diminutive warriors is equal to carry _muskets cut down_, for they shall never appear, while I command them, otherwise than as soldiers.... Hard times, indeed, and great must be the scarcity of men, when the Royal Artillery is obliged to take such reptiles. I would they were back in the bogs from which they sprang." In less than a hundred years, had the General lived, he would have seen many of even a worse stamp landing here, to swell the army of New York Rowdies,—men who poison the blood of the American commonwealth, making the great Republic break out into hideous and pestilent sores, which in the eyes of the world deface and hide the beauties it so undoubtedly possesses.