At the opening of the crocuses, in the spring of 1778, Lord Howe and his brother, the Admiral, were in the Quaker City, a city which, though mainly made up of the disciples of peace, wielded both pen and musket in favor of war for peace. A French fleet, commanded by Count d’Estaing, sailed from France to pen up in the Delaware the English brothers with their fleet and army; but these some Howe getting at once wind of this intention and into their own sails, contrived to escape to New York. Part of the British forces took the land route to New York, courageously braving the dangers incident to New Jersey travelling. A little accident befell them on the route, June 28th, about eighteen miles south of Philadelphia, at a small place then called Monmouth, where, colliding with Washington and the artillery train of which he was conductor, they lost three hundred men. The American loss was only seventy,—very trifling for a genuine American collision. It was in this battle that General Charles Lee became insubordinate, lost his reason, and was cast on the lee shore of patriotic duty,—a misfortune which, eighty-three years later, happened to another general of the same name. The French fleet, finding on its arrival at Philadelphia, that the Howes had gone to New York, followed suit thitherward; but on reaching Sandy Hook, it was defeated in its intended action against them by an injunction raised by the New York bar, and so proceeded to that fashionable watering-place, Newport. Admiral Howe soon after took a notion to go to the same place, and, being reinforced by several ships, set out with his squadron. D’Estaing, intermitting his study of the “Round Tower,” “The Spouting Rock,” and “The Dumplings,” sailed out like a generous foe, to meet him half-way. The fleets, long in ogling sight, and loath to leave each other, were yet kept apart by those adverse winds and rough seas which sometimes in naval war, as in love, neither blow nor run smooth, and which, at least in this case,—as sometimes happens with lovers,—prevented an engagement. In September, General Clinton, who had superseded Lord Howe, sent out two marauding expeditions, one to Buzzard’s Bay, which burnt seventy American ships roosting there on their anchors; the other against Little Egg Harbor, which took a considerable amount of stores laid there, over which much British cackling was had. The massacre at Wyoming by Colonel John Butler and his Indian allies—only palliated by the plea that, while it cruelly put out of existence some three hundred settlers, it called into being the beautiful “Gertrude of Wyoming”—and the barbarities committed by another band of Tories and savages at Cherry Valley, raised the hair on the head of many in Europe as well as in America.