An extract from one of Washington's letters to Congress may not be out of place: "We have this day no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men unfit for duty, because they are barefoot or otherwise naked. Our whole strength in continental troops amounts to no more than eight thousand two hundred men. Since the fourth instant, owing to hardships and exposures, our numbers have decreased nearly two thousand men. Numbers are obliged to sit all night by the fires; or sleep on a cold, bleak hill, under frost and snow, without clothes or blankets." All this time the British soldiers in Philadelphia were well provided for; the officers were living in luxury at the expense of the inhabitants. The days were spent in pastime, the nights in entertainments. {179} It was at this period of the war--the darkest through which the nation ever passed--that the following incident occurred. It was observed that each day after Washington had visited the hospital tents and administered to the sick whatever necessities or comforts he had in his power to bestow, he retired into the forest at some distance from the camp. Curiosity prompted an individual, named Isaac Pitts, to follow him. There, at the foot of a large tree, with head uncovered, kneeling in the snow, was seen the commander-in-chief of the American armies, engaged in prayer before God. With an anxious and burdened mind--a mind conscious of its need of divine support and consolation--Washington went and rolled those mighty burdens--too heavy for him to bear unaided--upon the arm of Omnipotence. Isaac Pitts related what he had seen and heard, and on a subsequent day at least three persons beheld the venerated "father of his country," at prayer before his God. It is recorded in Matthew vi., 6: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." May we not believe that the high moral courage which dared greater perils than the whistling of bullets; that will of mighty strength which having chosen the right, though unpopular, never deviated from it; that calm self-command, which bore up under the greatest reverses and still preserved its equanimity amidst the taunts of enemies and censure of friends--may we not believe that these things were among the open rewards of secret prayer?