Lee arrived at New York on the 4th of February, his caustic humors sharpened by a severe attack of the gout, which had rendered it necessary, while on the march, to carry him for a considerable part of the way in a litter. His correspondence is a complete mental barometer. “I consider it as a piece of the greatest good fortune,” writes he to Washington (Feb. 5th), “that the Congress have detached a committee to this place, otherwise I should have made a most ridiculous figure, besides bringing upon myself the enmity of the whole province. My hands were effectually tied up from taking any step necessary for the public service by the late resolve of Congress, putting every detachment of the continental forces under the command of the Provincial Congress where such detachment is.” By a singular coincidence, on the very day of his arrival Sir Henry Clinton, with the squadron which had sailed so mysteriously from Boston, looked into the harbor. “Though it was Sabbath,” says a letter-writer of the day, “it threw the whole city into such a convulsion as it never knew before. Many of the inhabitants hastened to move their effects into the country, expecting an immediate conflict. All that day and all night, were there carts going and boats loading, and women and children crying, and distressed voices heard in the roads in the dead of the night.”[47] Clinton sent for the mayor, and expressed much surprise and concern at the distress caused by his arrival; which was merely, he said, on a short visit to his friend Tryon, and to see how matters stood. He professed a juvenile love for the place, and desired that the inhabitants might be informed of the purport of his visit, and that he would go away as soon as possible. “He brought no troops with him,” writes Lee, “and pledges his honor that none are coming. He says it is merely a visit to his friend Tryon. If it is really so, it is the most whimsical piece of civility I ever heard of.” A gentleman in New York, writing to a friend in Philadelphia, reports one of the general’s characteristic menaces, which kept the town in a fever. “Lee says, he will send word on board of the men-of-war, that, if they set a house on fire, he will chain a hundred of their friends by the neck, and make the house their funeral pile.”[48] For this time, the inhabitants of New York were let off for their fears. Clinton, after a brief visit, continued his mysterious cruise, openly avowing his destination to be North Carolina—which nobody believed, simply because he avowed it.