It was not the custom of that age to confiscate private property simply because the owners were on the losing side, still less to confiscate it under local instead of national authority. But need, greed, and resentment were stronger than any scruples. Need was the weakest, resentment the strongest of all the animating motives. The American army was in rags and its pay greatly in arrears while the British forces under Carleton were fed, clothed, and paid in the regular way. But it was the passionate resentment of the revolutionists that perverted this exasperating difference into another 'intolerable wrong.' Washington was above such meaner measures. But when he said the Loyalists were only fit for suicide, and when Adams, another future president, said they ought to be hanged, it is little wonder that lesser men thought the time had come for legal looting. Those Loyalists who best understood the temper of their late fellow-countrymen left at once. They were right. Even to be a woman was no protection against confiscation in the case of Mary Phillips, sister-in-law to Beverley Robinson, a well-known Loyalist who settled in New Brunswick after the Revolution. Her case was not nearly so hard as many another. But her historic love-affair makes it the most romantic. Eight-and-twenty years before this General Braddock had marched to death and defeat beside the Monongahela with two handsome and gallant young aides-de-camp, Washington and Morris. Both fell in love with bewitching Mary Phillips. But, while Washington left her fancy-free, Morris won her heart and hand. Now that the strife was no longer against a foreign foe but between two British parties, the former aides-de-camp found themselves rivals in arms as well as love; for Colonel Morris was Carleton's right-hand man in all that concerned the Loyalists, being the official head of the department of Claims and Succour: