A special train brought the deputation into Washington before daylight next morning. The New York men went at once to the White House where they were received by the President, who had not been in bed. “You have no doubt that they mean to make good their threat of bombardment?” asked the President, after receiving their report. “Then, gentlemen, there is only one action for this Government to take.” He sighed, and echoed the refrain of all the past days. “There is nothing else that we can do.” An hour later the wires to New York, cleared by orders from the War Department, carried a dispatch to the commandants at Fort Hamilton and Fort Wadsworth. It ordered them to surrender. From his headquarters the enemy commander ordered detachments to go down the harbor in boats and occupy the captured defenses. Then he sent his troops forward into the City. And now the New Yorkers who had expected that their streets would be flooded by a great army, were amazed at the ease and simplicity with which the city fell into military control. Instead of brigades entering the city, there were not even regiments. Troops of cavalry, companies of infantry, single machine-gun detachments, moving separately down separated avenues, with big intervals between them, were all the force that entered. Some boatloads of men and artillery passed down the river and landed in Brooklyn, some to occupy the Navy Yard and others to reënforce the men who had come in through Long Island; but the army remained outside, holding the northern districts from the Sound to the Hudson, and guarding the Hudson River and Putnam Valleys against surprise attack from the direction of Albany. _An Easy City to Occupy_ The officers in charge of the men who entered the city asked no questions and required no directions. Unhesitatingly each led his force to the point that he wanted. Within two hours New York was wholly in the hands of the soldiers. Nobody had thought of it before. Now, all at once, when it was accomplished, it amazed the people of New York to learn how easy it was to control the city’s whole life, civic and commercial. A battalion of infantry occupied the Grand Central Terminal. Another battalion took the great Pennsylvania terminal with its under-river tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island. Detachments appeared at the Twenty-third Street and Forty-second Street ferries over the Hudson River and by that one seizure controlled all railroad connections with the West from uptown. The occupation of half a dozen other Hudson River railroad ferries down-town, and of the Hudson Terminal Tube System, completed the entire control of all the city’s railroad traffic in every direction. Equally simple was the control of its communications. Men appeared at the two great telegraph buildings and at the telephone building. Within half an hour they had every trunk line of wires in their hands and could strike the city dumb at will.