ings per week ; and, of course, Barclay was superseded and the coveted job was given to the last comer. 8 Very reasonably, Barclay complained to the Congress, and made a counter-offer which was more favorable than the offer on which Allen had been employed; and, of course, the latter was ousted, leaving him in possession 9 -- an illustration of what material the newcreated controlling power, (" the Ring," if the reader pleases,) in Westchester-county, in 1776, was composed; and in what the "patriotism" of that controlling power consisted.

In the latter part of January, 1776, burning with anxiety to be at the head of a separate command, away from General Washington, and availing himself of the rumor that a heavy military force had been sent from Boston, probably to New York, 10 the infamous Charles Lee, who was, then, second in command of the Continental Army and in the zenith of his evanescent fame, induced the Commander-in-chief 11 to despatch him, from Boston, to the latter City, "with " such volunteers as he " \could~\ " quickly assemble, "on his march, in order to put the City of New York " in the best posture of defense the season and circum- " stances will admit of." 12

In the prosecution of the duties to which General Lee had been thus assigned -- in his enlistment of men into the service of the Continent ; in his appointment of the ruffian, Isaac Sears, to a high military office ; in the barbarities inflicted on the inhabitants of Queens-county, by his authorized representative, Sears ; in his haughty disregard of the local authorities, legal or revolutionary, in New York ; and in hig personal and official intercourse with those authorities and with the inhabitants of the City -- the Instructions which General Washington had given to him, as well as the superior enactments of the Continental Congress and his own knowledge of the proprieties of intercourse between individuals and of the character of obligations in business relations, were entirely disregarded ; and he permitted himself to be controlled, instead, by his own vile and illcontrolled passions and by the promptings of those, as ill-constituted as himself, who were gathered around him and who pandered to his vanity and his malignancy, for the promotion of their own evil purposes.