On the other hand, Roger Conant had that to tell regarding some of the British forces which does not form pleasant reading, but which the author feels impelled to set down in order to present a faithful picture of Great Britain’s stupendous folly, viz., her war with the American colonies in 1776. The first body of irregular troops of any sort that he saw who were fighting for the King were Butler’s Rangers, which body, to his astonishment, he found in northern New York State when wending his way to Upper Canada. For some time he tarried in the district where this force was carrying on its operations. It would seem as if the very spirit of the evil one had taken possession of these men. Acts of arson by which the unfortunate settler lost his log cabin, the only shelter for his wife and little ones from the inclemency of a northern winter, were too common to remark. Murder and rapine were acts of everyday occurrence. Manifestly these atrocious guerillas could not remain in the neighborhood that witnessed their crimes. They found their way in various directions to places where they hoped to evade the tale of their villany. In after years one of these very men wandered to Upper Canada, and, as it happened, hired himself to Roger Conant to work about the latter’s homestead at Darlington. An occasion came when this man, who was very reticent, had partaken too freely of liquor, so that his tongue was loosed, and in an unbroken flow of words he unfolded a boastful narrative of the horrid deeds of himself and his companions of Butler’s Rangers. One day, he said, they entered a log-house in the forest in New York State, and quickly murdered the mother and her two children. They were about applying the torch to the dwelling, when he discovered an infant asleep, covered with an old coverlet, in the corner of an adjoining bedroom. He drew the baby forth, when one of the Rangers, not quite lost to all sense of humanity, begged him to spare the child, “because,” as he said, “it can do no harm.” With a drunken, leering boast he declared he would not, “for,” said he, as he dashed its head against the stone jamb of the open fireplace, “Nits make lice, and I won’t save it.” It is no wonder that Roger Conant said that many times his heart failed him when these terrible acts of Butler’s Rangers were being perpetrated, and that he felt sorry even then, when in New York State and on his way to Upper Canada, that he had not remained in Massachusetts and joined the patriots. It is to be remembered that these persons were burnt out, murdered, and their women outraged, simply because they thought Britain bore too heavily on them, and that reforms were needed in the colonies. Nor could these acts in even the smallest degree assist the cause of Britain from a military point of view.