Later in the year, long after I was wholly recovered, my cousin confided to me that this was an amiable lie, designed to instil me with that confidence which is so great a part of the battle gained, and that for a week or so my chance of life had been held hardly worth a _son marquee_. But I did not now know this, and I tried to fasten my mind upon that encounter in the drift by the guard-house, which was my last recollection. Much of it curiously eluded my mental grasp for a time; then all at once it came to me. "Do you know, Teunis," I said, "that I believe it was Philip Cross who broke my head with his pistol-butt?" "Nonsense!" "Yes, it surely was--and he knew me, too!" And I explained the grounds for my confidence. "Well, young man," said Dr. Teunis, at last, "if you do not find that gentleman out somewhere, sometime, and choke him, and tear him up into fiddle-strings, you've not a drop of Van Hoorn blood in your whole carcass!" Chapter XXV. A Crestfallen Return to Albany. For a man who had his physician's personal assurance that there was nothing serious in his case, I recovered my strength with vexatious slowness. There was a very painful and wearing week, indeed, before it became clear to me that I was even convalescent, and thereafter my progress was wofully halting and intermittent. Perhaps health would have come more rapidly if with every sound of the guns from the platforms, and every rattle of the drums outside, I had not wrathfully asked myself, "Of what use is all this now, alas!" These bad days were nearing their end when Dr. Teunis one afternoon came in with tidings from home. An express had arrived from Albany, bringing the intelligence that General Wooster was shortly to come with re-enforcements, to take over our headless command. There were many letters for the officers as well, and among these were two for me. The physician made some show of keeping these back from me, but the cousin relented, and I was bolstered up in bed to read them. One was a business epistle from Albany, enclosing a brief memorandum of the disposition of certain moneys and goods belonging to the English trading company whose agent I had been, and setting my mind at ease concerning what remained of its interests. The other was a much longer missive, written in my mother's neat, painstaking hand, and in my mother's language. My story can be advanced in no better way than by translating freely from the original Dutch document, which I still have, and which shows, if nothing else, that Dame Mauverensen had powers of directness and brevity of statement not inherited by her son. "_January 9,_ A. D. 1776.