The gathering in of one thousand dead and wounded from the Long Island hills was not the kind of harvesting that the agricultural lads expected; and as they had only engaged for a short job, many of them went back on the 28th to their own farms. Washington not liking to be sandwiched with the rest of his forces, numbering some fourteen thousand, between Howe’s Germans and the East River, contrived during the misty night of the 29th of August to get over the river to New York,—an exploit much vaunted then among military men, but rendered very easy in our time by the Union Ferry Company’s boats. The country recruits who are now transported every Sunday across the same river to Beecher’s church, when there again transported, and after the service transported back again, show what changes have occurred in the facilities for moving large bodies of men over the East River since the battle of Long Island. Howe’s Hessians threatening to emigrate en masse to New York, General Washington, on the 10th of September, made room for them by taking his young army to the upper part of Manhattan Island, giving them an opportunity to see the rustic beauties of Harlem and the country around the present High Bridge. As it sometimes happens in war, as well as in peace, that different gentlemen take a fancy to the same piece of ground, whose possession and value are enhanced thereby, General Howe’s desire to become possessed of the same real estate in the actual occupation of Washington, reached such a pitch that he sent a large party of military friends to seize it, even if by so doing they were obliged to dispossess its occupant. The friends of the Squire, however, resented this violent attempt so spiritedly that, as it has often fallen out since, the visitors to Harlem went back to New York with very red eyes and faces unkindly disfigured. Lord Howe next attempted to get around the Squire by sending a part of his force, now increased to thirty-five thousand men, into the lower district of Westchester to see how Harlem and the Continentals looked from the rear, and the other part on a lively picnic up the Hudson River; but the wary leader of the Americans had seen, when surveying or hunting in Virginia and Ohio, too many traps set by Indians and white trappers to be caught between the steel jaws of this English one. So he pulled his men away from the cautiously planted contrivance and took them several miles to the northeast, on the Bronx River. He allowed several of them, however, to go up to White Plains, where, to his chagrin, they were set upon by a large British party and very disagreeably handled.