From the beginning of the war, almost all the young men had been out in arms, either for the King or the Common-wealth. Whole sets of brothers, some of them yet in boy-hood, had abandoned the paternal household and gone off to enrol themselves among soldiers, either above or below. They generally remained together, but sometimes disagreed in allegiance and joined hostile ranks; often, never more to behold each other, and not unfrequently to meet again, face to face, in mortal controversy. The unhappy conditions of the peaceful, and, for the most part, aged proprietors, who clung to their homes and strove to extract a miserable subsistence from their native soil, could not fail to excite general sympathy; and the public authorities, both Republican and Royal, in consideration of their neutrality, not only allowed them to remain, but ex-tended to them such protection as was practicable. But, although in general unmolested by the military, or by men in office, they were fair game for the lawless followers who hung loosely upon the skirts of either party; being sometimes tortured to the verge of death for a confession of the places where their valuables were concealed, frequently robbed of their clothing and cattle, and often compelled, for months together, to seek safety during night, by sleeping in barns, under haystacks, or amidst the deepest recesses of the woods. So unmerciful and continued were these persecutions, that, as men of the firmest mould afterward related of them-selves, they started with alarm on hearing the baying of a watch-dog, and suffered nervous disturbance even from a simple knocking at the door. Such were the circumstances under which the farmers of the "Neutral Ground" contrived to prolong a precarious existence throughout a civil war of seven years' duration; tormented in the morning by marauders who shouted "God and the King," and at night by plunderers, who huzzaed for "God and Congress." From an early period of the war, the advanced posts of the British lines in Westchester had been held, mainly, by two