and other trophies excited their hope and confidence. While the Americans were exulting upon the occasion on the one side, the royal army under Burgoyne experienced a degree of depression on the other; especially as the disaster at Bennington not only added to their delay, but gave Gates the opportunity of strengthening himself, by the arrival of the militia, who were upon their march to reinforce him. When he was upon his journey to take the command, he was much dejected, no less than the troops which were to be under him; but the Bennington affair put them both in better spirits, and afforded them some promising expectations. They relied on his abilities, so that his appearance at camp, and his mode of conducting military business, at once filled them with courage and resolution; and in a few days they faced about and advanced toward Burgoyne. On the 30th of August, the British commander had occasion to write to him; and in his letter complained of inhumanity exercised toward the provincial soldiers in the king’s service after the affair of Bennington; and then hinted a retaliation. Gen. Gates, in his answer of September the 2d, invalidated the charge, and then retorted the Indian cruelties, which he imputed to Burgoyne, saying, “Miss M’Rea, a young lady, lovely to the sight, of virtuous character and amiable disposition, engaged to an officer of your army, was with other women and children, taken out of a house near Fort Edward, carried into the woods, and there scalped and mangled in a most shocking manner. Two parents with their six children, were all treated with the same inhumanity, while quietly residing in their once happy and peaceful dwelling. The miserable fate of Miss M’Rea was particularly aggravated, by her being dressed to receive her promised husband, when she met her murderer employed by you. Upward of 100 men, women and children, have perished by the hands of the ruffians, to whom, it is asserted, you have paid the price of blood.” General Burgoyne, in his reply of the 6th of Sept. vindicated his own character; showed that Miss M’Rea’s death was no premeditated barbarity; and declared that instance excepted, Gates’s intelligence, respecting the cruelties of the Indians, was false. It might be erroneous in point of numbers and other circumstances; but Burgoyne was undoubtedly mistaken in pronouncing it all false, with only a single exception. The number of Indians that joined him was 500. The first party sent out paid attention to the restrictions he had laid them under, in his speech of June the 21st, near Crown-Point; and when they had made several of the Americans prisoners in the heat of the action, treated them with European humanity. But they could not long brook such restraints. They grew uneasy, and reverted to their cruelties and habits of plunder; and several persons became victims to their mode of war. My account of Miss M’Rea’s death will differ only circumstantially from Burgoyne’s. Mr.