Washington had advised General Arnold that he would soon be tendered an active command. But that officer, pleading as excuse continued suffering from his wounds, expressed a preference for the command of a military post. After urgent solicitation of himself and his friends, he was authorized to designate the post of his choice. As the result, on the third of August, he was assigned to the command of “West Point and its dependencies, in which all are included, from Fishkill to King’s Ferry.” At the date of this assignment of Arnold to a post which was rightly regarded by Washington as most vital to ultimate American success, a clandestine correspondence had already passed between Generals Clinton and Arnold, through the medium of Major John André. The attention of the reader is naturally retrospective, as the name of André reappears in connection with that of Arnold. He had been taken prisoner at St. John’s; was once on parole at Montreal, and familiar with Arnold’s habits and the outrageous abuse of his public trust with which, there, as afterwards at Philadelphia, he had been charged. André also knew of his gambling, his extravagance, his ambition, and his reckless daring, generally. His own personal antecedents during the grand ovation tendered to General Howe, upon that officer’s departure from Philadelphia, in which he had so conspicuously figured as escort to Miss Shippen, afterwards the wife of Arnold, acquire special interest. He was, and long had been, a confidential member of General Clinton’s staff. Neither Clinton nor André could conceive, for a moment, that Arnold and his wife, formerly Miss Shippen, would betray André’s confidence; or, if the proposition to betray West Point failed, that André would be allowed to suffer.