They lived, on their way through Westchester-county as well as while they were within the City, entirely on their wits and on the products of their wits, professing to have come only ■' with a view of aiding and assisting " us in preparing for our defense ;" but their reckless arrogance and audacity, in their assumption of authority in local affairs as well as in other matters, in which they were evidently sustained by some of the more desperate of the leaders of the revolutionary faction, in the City of New York, which were made matters of record, had they not been only earlier specimens of the peculiarly " New England ideas " which, subsequently, became so common and so well known, would have been regarded, by those of later periods, as unaccountable, if not impossible. 1 Thoughtful men, therefore, had abundant reason for reflection ; and men of property needed to provide for the security of their possessions; and peaceful men and heads of families did well, when they sought shelter in distant parts of the country, while there were so many and such portentous warnings of the ills which were so evidently and so rapidly approaching.

The excitement and bitterness of factional strife, not always of a purely political character, with which the City of New York had been unceasingly afflicted, during several years preceding the period now under consideration, had tended to the serious disturbance of the individual and social relations of many of those who lived in that City ; and the political annals of that period afford ample testimony to the fact that terrorism, there, one of the reasonable results of the existing excitement, was prevalent, audacious, and unchecked by those in authority. The County of Westchester, in her rural contentment, as has been seen in other portions of this narrative, had continued, during the entire period of that earlier revolutionary era, in the City of New York, to enjoy peace and good-will among her inhabitants ; but .the Meeting at the White Plains, on the eleventh of April,