In July, Major Fay was sent to the enemy on Lake Champlain, to complete the exchange of prisoners, and was received on board the Royal George. The British found him as unprepared as Colonel Allen had been to close with the proffered terms, but wishing to continue the negotiations till November. The British agents suspected that the Vermonters were procrastinating to save themselves from an invasion by king or Congress. "Upon the whole," they said, "it appears to us that interest, not loyalty, induces the leading men of Vermont to unite with Canada. One fifth of the people wish it from the same motive, near another fifth from principles of loyalty, and the remainder are mad rebels." Yet the hope of drawing such a rebellious people to the king's cause was not abandoned, and the correspondence continued. Emissaries from Canada came now and then to Ethan Allen and his brother Ira. Unmolested if not undiscovered, they made their stealthy journeys between Canada and the Vermont settlements. Gliding in light canoes along the lake in the shadow of cedar-clad shores, up the solitude of wooded streams where only the silent flight of the disturbed heron heralded their approach, and stealing along the byways of almost forgotten Indian trails, they found at last safe hiding during their brief tarries, delivered in the dusk their precious packets, received others, and then returned by the ways they had come. In July, Ira Allen wrote to General Haldimand that he and two others had been appointed agents to Congress, with full powers to make and receive proposals for articles of union between the United States and Vermont. "It is expected that the said agents will make proposals to Congress that will not be accepted, and show that Congress means nothing more than to keep this State in suspense till the end of the war, and then divide the territory among the claiming States." Yet when, soon afterward, Allen was acting as agent to Congress, he so far yielded the claim of Vermont to her east and west unions that the boundaries proposed by him through a member from Connecticut were at once accepted by Congress, though afterward rejected by Vermont on the ground that the proposals had not been officially made by her agents. This shows that his real preferences were not such as he would lead Haldimand to believe.