Each dawn was heralded by gold fire, each evening by a rosy conflagration in the west. It rained only at night; and all that crystal clear mid-summer scarcely a shred of fleece dappled the empyrean. Those winds which blow so frequently in our Northland seemed to have become zephyrs, too; and there was but a reedy breeze along the Vlaie Water, and scarce a ripple to rock the lily pads in shallow reach and cove. It was strange. And, only for the loveliness of night and day, there might have seemed in this hushed tranquillity around me a sort of hidden menace. For all around about was war, where Tryon County lay so peacefully in the sunshine, ringed within the outer tumult, and walled on all sides by battle smoke. Above us our fever-stricken Northern army, driven from Crown Point, now lay and sickened at Ticonderoga, where General Gates did now command our people, while poor Arnold, turned ship's carpenter, laboured to match Guy Carleton's flotilla which the British were dragging piecemeal over Chambly Rapids to blow us out o' the lake. From south of us came news of the Long Island disaster where His Excellency, driven from Brooklyn and New York, now lay along the Harlem Heights. And it was a sorry business; for Billy Alexander, who is Lord Stirling, was taken a prisoner; and Sullivan also was taken; and their two brigades were practically destroyed. But worse happened at New York City, where the New York militia ran and two New England brigades, seized with panic, fled in a shameful manner. And so out o' town our people pulled foot, riotous and disorderly in retreat, and losing all our heavy guns, nearly all our stores, and more than three hundred prisoners. This was the news I had of the Long Island battle, where I lay in convalescence at Summer House that strange, still summer in the North. And I thought very bitterly of what advantage was it that we had but just rung bells and fired off our cannon to salute our new Declaration of Independence, and had upset the prancing leaden King from his pedestal on the Bowling Green, if our militia ran like rabbits at sight of the red-coats, and general officers like Lord Stirling were mouse-trapped in their first battle. Alas for poor New York, where fire and explosion had laid a third of the city in ruins; where the drums of the red-coats now rolled brazenly along the Broadway; where Delancy's horsemen scoured the island for friends to liberty; where that great wretch, Loring, lorded it like an unclean devil of the pit. God! to think on it when all had gone so well; and Boston clean o' red-coats, and Canada all but in our grasp; and old Charleston shaking with her dauntless cannonade, and our people's volleys pouring into Dunmore's hirelings through the levelled cinders of Norfolk town!