Towards the South the war now turns. The French and English fleets, having sailed for the West Indies, thus relieving Sir Henry Clinton of a natural anxiety about New York, he despatched thence, in November of the same year, a force of two thousand men against Georgia. Savannah, just then preparing to receive her first bran-new city charter, and feeling like a boy who is promised his first pair of long pantaloons to cover his lengthening proportions, was taken in hand by Clinton’s military schoolmaster and humiliated by a gentle spanking. Her sandy bottom, however, stood the trouncing well. She had the hardihood even to look right pleased and content when it was soon after told her that an expedition sent out against Port Royal, South Carolina, had been soundly ferruled. The year 1779 opened with, and shut upon, a lively guerrila war, carried on through Georgia and South Carolina by small bodies of troops, so light as almost to seem feathered, led by Moultrie, Pickens, and other partisan officers, who teased and worried the enemy by incessant scratches and irritating stings, especially annoying in the summer-time and amid a warm climate. [Illustration: PUTNAM’S HOME-STRETCH DOWN HORSE-NECK. (p. 293) ] At the North the British forces spent themselves on small excursions out of New York, very much as many people still do, and with the same result,—exhausting their own means and boring the people up the Sound and Hudson River. On one of these excursions under Governor Tryon, an attack by fifteen hundred men was made in March, 1779, upon Horse-Neck, one of Putnam’s outposts, a high, steep hill defended by one hundred and fifty men and two old rusty field-pieces. The powder failing, these loud-talking mouthpieces of the little party were almost silenced, when a cavalry charge was ordered upon the small band at the top of the hill. Putnam’s troops were directed to withdraw behind a morass inaccessible to cavalry, when Putnam himself, staying behind to serve the hard old swivels with the few grains of powder freshly discovered, and, finding himself closely pressed by assailants, leaped upon his horse and launched himself down the precipitous ledge amid a tempest of bullets and stones. It was neck or nothing; and he won by a neck,—his own,—which, had the horse given out, would probably have been stretched. In September of this year Count d’Estaing returned from the West Indies with his fleet; and having in vain tried to recapture Savannah, took French leave of it and of America, having had a yachting trip in American waters with the usual yachting experience,—a good deal of getting up, a deal of getting down, large consumption of provisions and liquors, high hopes in idle state-rooms, and low performances on deck.