Just about the time that these French gentlemen, with Baron De Kalb, touched foot on American soil at Georgetown, South Carolina, an Englishman named Burgoyne, whose acquaintance we made at Bunker Hill, two years ago, came on shore at Quebec. Entering the Colonies by that favorite back-stairs, Lake Champlain, he turned the well-known and well-worn knob, Ticonderoga, and got himself and his attendants fairly inside the American door-yard. Advancing, he came to a small place called Stillwater, where he tripped his toe over a little hillock, called a breastwork, raised by Kosciusko, aided by that crack rifleman, Morgan, and pitched forward faint and weak from this unexpected accident. Still, his English robustness of strength and pluck was such as to make him quite confident of being able to reach, without difficulty, the wing of the house, called Albany, and thence gaining access to its centre, New York, where he expected to meet Sir William Howe, and with him to succeed in bringing back once more the spirited young American heiress to the selfish love of her late champion. But quite to his surprise he discovered before him, near Saratoga Springs, Gates through which he must pass in order to make any progress,—Gates so strong that, unless he could force their Polish locks, their American hinges, and solid, iron-riveted timbers, he must perish for want of food. The Gates were not passed; and October 17, 1777, he gave himself up, with 5,791 officers and men, and forty-six hundred muskets. Forty-two pieces of brass cannon also passed at that time to the Americans,—brass which gave them thenceforward more confidence and cheek. Much need, too, of it had they; for in the preceding two months, Washington, with thirteen thousand men, following Howe and Cornwallis southward, with a body of eighteen thousand men under their command, met them a few miles south of Philadelphia, on a little, dispirited stream called the Brandywine, and there drank the disagreeable dregs of a defeat, made even more distasteful by the fact that it was the first American drink which Lafayette and Pulaski had an opportunity of sipping in this country. Exceedingly nauseated by this drink, they all took another draught October 4th at Germantown; but this decoction proved equally unpalatable. It required all the beneficial effects of the Saratoga water to correct the disturbed action produced by the Brandywine and the Germantown potion.