These were delivered by the settlers' appointed agents, Captain Stephen Fay and his son, and were laid before his council by Governor Tryon. Upon due consideration, the council recommended that all prosecutions in behalf of the crown, for crimes with which the settlers were charged, should be suspended till his Majesty's pleasure should be known, and that owners of contested lands under grants from New York should stop all civil suits concerning the same during the like period, and agree with the settlers for the purchase thereof on moderate terms, on condition that the inhabitants concerned in the late disorders should conform to the law of New York that settlers on both sides in the controversy should continue undisturbed, and such as had been dispossessed, or forced by threats or other means, to desert their farms, should in future enjoy their possessions unmolested. This report was approved by the governor. When the agents, returning with it, laid it before the Committee of Safety and the people assembled in the meeting-house at Bennington, there was great rejoicing over it. There was a universal expression of a desire for peace. The "whole artillery of Bennington, and the small arms," thundered and rattled salutes in honor of the governor and council of New York, and healths to the king, to Governor Tryon, and to the council were drunk "by sundry respectable Gentlemen." Unfortunately for the continuance of this promising condition of affairs, news had come before the return of the agents that a surveyor employed by the New York claimants was surveying lands for them in some of the townships to the northward. Thereupon Ethan Allen, with a small party, went in pursuit of him, took him prisoner, and returned with him to Castleton, where he was tried and sentenced to banishment, under pain of death if again found within the limits of the Grants. Upon learning the favorable progress of the negotiations with New York, his judges revoked the rigorous decree and set him at liberty. Making the most of their time while in pursuit of the surveyor, Allen and his men halted at the First Falls of Otter Creek, in the present city of Vergennes, to dispossess the tenants of Colonel Reid, who had himself previously dispossessed persons who, under a New Hampshire grant issued in 1761, had settled there and built a sawmill. Allen's party drove the intruders away, burned their log-houses, and broke the stones of the gristmill Reid had built, and reestablished the New Hampshire grantee in his sawmill.