It was a decisive moment in the history of America when on the 8th of August, 1746, the two rival divisions marched down old Patroon Street, the Clinton Avenue of to-day, and into State Street to Fort Frederick. Leading the Mohawk band in all the paraphernalia of Indian dress and decoration, with abundant ochre and plumes, was the pale-faced man, Johnson, who could whoop, yell, leap, dance, run, wrestle, play racket, and eat dog-hash—drawing the line at the cannibal feast,—with the best champions in any of the six tribes. The double column moved past Fort Frederick, where now stands the Episcopal Church, the Indians firing their guns and the fort its ordnance. Then the gates of the sallyport swung open, and in the largest room of the fort the red men squatted and were served with food. CHAPTER V. A CHAPTER IN THE STORY OF LIBERTY. WHEN the conference opened, August 19, Dr. Cadwallader took the place of Governor Clinton, who was down with fever. The two delegates from Massachusetts, Mr. Nelles and Colonel Wendell, were also present, but none from Connecticut appeared. Colden’s speech was a bubble of rhetoric, fairly dazzling with the prismatics of a lively imagination. It rehearsed facts, fancies, and prophecies appropriate to the situation. The colossal but purely mythical preparations supposed to be made in Great Britain, in the reality of which the sailor-governor himself heartily believed, were duly set forth. Then the wrongs suffered by the Indians at the hands of the “perfidious” French were detailed, until the braves were stirred in eye and nostril, and the chiefs grunted out, “Yo-hay! yo-hay!” (“Do you hear! do you believe!”), and general applause in Indian fashion followed as the interpreter finished each sentence. The war spirit was further roused by flatteries which fell like oil on the flames, kindling the fiercest enthusiasm. After the usual promises of gifts and equipment, with assurance of reward and booty in the future, the orator wound up by narrating the murder of some white men, their brothers, even since their arrival in Albany, and calling upon his hearers for immediate and permanent revenge. Taking it all in all, this speech of Clinton and Colden’s is a fair sample of the lies, false promises, and irresponsible assertions on which the red man has been fed, from the first coming of the whites, to the battle with the Sioux, near Pine Ridge Agency, in January, 1891. The proper peroration of the speech, according to Indian etiquette, was the casting down of a wampum war-belt with verbal assurances and in symbolic intent that the British would live and die with their brethren the Iroquois. When this was done, a war-whoop was raised that must have been heard in every cabin and iron-monogrammed brick-house in the colony and manor.