"I have always found a difficulty in procuring intelligence by the means of paper money, and I perceive that it increases." It continued to increase, until, I suppose, an offer of a million dollars in paper would not have induced a spy to enter the enemy's lines. In fact, the general himself says as much. In acknowledging the receipt of five hundred guineas for the secret service, he says that for want of a little gold he had been obliged to dispense with the services of some of his informers; and adds: "In some cases no consideration in paper money has been found sufficient to effect even an engagement to procure intelligence; and where it has been otherwise, the terms of service on account of the depreciation have been high, if not exorbitant." The time was not distant when paper money ceased to have any value, and Governor Jefferson of Virginia paid his whole salary for a year (a thousand pounds) for a second-hand side-saddle. During the later years of the war, the city of New York was the chief source of information concerning the designs and movements of the enemy. General Washington, as early as 1778, had always two or three correspondents there upon whose information he could rely if only they could send it out to him. Sometimes, when his ordinary correspondents failed him, he would send in a spy disguised as a farmer driving a small load of provisions, and who would bring out some family supplies, as tea, sugar, and calico, the better to conceal his real object. Often the spy _was_ a farmer, and sometimes quite illiterate. As it was unsafe for him to have any written paper upon his person, he was required to learn by heart the precise message which he was to deliver in the city, as also the information which he received from the resident correspondent. The messenger frequently entered the city in the disguise of a peddler, a fact which suggested to Horace Greeley, when he was a printer's apprentice in Vermont, the idea of a story which he called "The Peddler-Spy of the Revolution." I once had in my hand a considerable package of his manuscript of this tale; but even as a boy he wrote so bad a hand that I could not read much of it. It is possible that this manuscript still exists.