While the wise men at Philadelphia were making the Fourth of July a precedent for the future by their very readable and taking Declaration of Independence, the English kites were gathering from the north, south, and east around New York. Lord Howe, from Halifax; Sir Henry Clinton, from Charleston; and Admiral Howe, from England, drawn together by focalizing orders, settled down with their separate flocks on Staten Island,—one of the lintels of the gateway to the metropolis,—numbering together twenty-four thousand old hawks which had often whetted their beaks before in Spanish, German, and Dutch blood. Washington had about seventeen thousand agricultural lads, armed with every possible and impossible accoutrement, contrivance, and weapon, to watch the well-trained brood. Lord Howe, being a royal commissioner as well as a general, understood letter-writing well; and his first care was to pen an epistle to the American commander. Upon its composition he bestowed as much care as a young man upon his first letter to the coy damsel whom he would conciliate; but upon the address he spent far greater pains. As despatched, it read “George Washington, Esquire.” Carried to the General, he declined to receive it. Not that he was not an “Esq.,” for all Americans are born such of course; but being a Squire in a military court whose proceedings were likely to be recorded, he conceived himself to be entitled to different honors. Defeated in his pen addresses, the British general tried another stroke. On the 22d of August, 1776, landing on Long Island, he commenced a march by three separate detachments towards Brooklyn, which, after a severe battle on the 27th of August, he took. It was the first invasion by the Germans of that quiet, pleasant, New York dormitory. Then the inhabitants took it very hard. Now, however, they have become so much accustomed to the German irruptions, that they have ceased to be astonished at their own frequent captures. We may add that the Hessians did not at that time elect Herr Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn. They waited nearly ninety years, and then returned, not to their mutton, but to their veal.