The author set out from Newport, where the troops had landed and gone into winter-quarters, in order to visit Pennsylvania. Accompanied by two aides-de-camp, one of whom was the Baron de Montesquieu, grandson of the author of the _Esprit des lois_, and by five mounted servants, he started, November 11, 1780, on horseback, for that was the only means of travelling that the country afforded. The ground was frozen hard, and already covered with snow. The little party directed their steps first toward Windham, where Lauzun's hussars, forming the advance-guard of the army, were encamped. They found the Duke de Lauzun at the head of his troops, and this meeting between the grandsons of d'Aguesseau and Montesquieu, and a descendant of the Lauzuns and Birons, all three fighting for the cause of liberty in the wilds of America, was a curious beginning of their adventures. It was this same Duke de Lauzun, a friend of Mirabeau and Talleyrand, who became Duke de Biron after the death of his uncle, was chosen a member of the States General in 1789, commanded the republican army of La Vendée, and finished his career on the scaffold. The travellers crossed the mountains which separated them from the Hudson, and, after passing through a wild and almost desert country, arrived at West Point, a place celebrated at that time for the most dramatic incidents of the war of independence (the treason of General Arnold and the execution of Major André), and now famous as the seat of the great military school of the United States. The American army occupying the forts of West Point, which Arnold's treachery had so nearly given over to the enemy, saluted the French major-general with thirteen guns--one for each state in the confederation. "Never," says he, "was honor more imposing or majestic. Every gun was, after a long interval, echoed back from the opposite bank with a noise nearly equal to that of the discharge itself. Two years ago, West Point was an almost inaccessible desert. This desert has been covered with fortresses and artillery by a people who, six years before, had never seen a cannon. The well-filled magazines, and the great number of guns in the different forts, the prodigious labor which must have been expended in transporting and piling up on the steep rocks such huge trunks of trees and blocks of hewn stone, give one a very different idea of the Americans from that which the English ministry have labored to convey to Parliament. A Frenchman might well be surprised that a nation hardly born should have spent in two years more than 12,000,000 francs in this wilderness; but how much greater must be his surprise when he learns that these fortifications have cost the state nothing, having been constructed by the soldiers, who not only received no extra allowance for the labor, but have not even touched their regular pay! It will be gratifying for him to know that these magnificent works were planned by two French engineers, M. du Portail and M.