In a few days after this battle, all New Jersey was cleared of British and Hessians, who dispersed in various directions, and sought to keep up their courage for several succeeding months by raids upon those peaceful, drowsy villages, Danbury in Connecticut, and Peekskill on the Hudson, and harrying off some of the delights of a German stomach,—winter apples, cider, and sausages. On the other hand, Colonel Meigs tickled the feet of Long Island one night in May, and touched up some British corns on its Sag Harbor toe, making even the grave Congress to laugh outright in a broad vote of thanks; while Colonel Barton, early one morning in July, took, in spite of his guards, the British Major-General Prescott out of his bed, where he was cuddling up to escape the Rhode Island fogs, and bore him off through his own troops, and even through a large British fleet lying off the main-land,—a little surprise party highly relished by the visitors and their colonial friends. The arrival in France, in the autumn of 1776, of Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to Congress, and of Benjamin Franklin, as commissioners, soon raised the gates which had barred French supplies of men and means from flowing into the service of the Colonies. Louis XVI. and Vergennes, his Foreign Minister, had neither forgotten the great fight for the American belt, nor the wrench which French pride had suffered by the tossing of the prize, but fifteen years ago, into the eager hands of its uncivil rival. They were, therefore, more than ready to help the ward escape from her self-constituted guardian, and to send her secretly such instruments as would file off her bolts, cut away the prison-like fences around her suspiciously guarded dwelling-place, and enlarge her straitening liberties. They had even, in the spring of 1777, secretly encouraged, while pretending to prevent, the armed emigration of Lafayette and others to America.