With the exception of a scattering fire across the marsh which separated the Neck from the mainland, which seems to have done no material damage, 1 there does not appear to have been any offensive movement whatever;" and there is very little reason for supposing that the entire period of the stay of the Army, at that place, was not duly occupied in the transportation of Stores and Provisions and means for Transportation and what must have been regarded as necessary reinforcements. 8

It is not an uncommon occurrence for those who are without information, during a War, to condemn what they regard as the tardiness, sometimes as the criminal tardiness, of a commanding General, in the movement of his command on some enterprise on which the faultfinders have rested large, very often unduly large, expectations ; and General Howe has not escaped from that very common condemnation. As we

payment of the transportation of the plunder, from the scenes of the thefts to the homes of the thieves and of their accessories, of high or low degree, in the neighboring State of Connecticut.*

1 Memoirs of General Heath, 70, 71.

2 Judge Jones, in his remarkably accurate History of New York during the Revolutionary War, (i., 122,) said of General Howe's occupation of Throgg's neck, "here a whole fortnight was spent in doing nothing " (plundering the inhabitants and stealing their horses excepted)." We incline to the belief, however, that General Howe had no communication with the mainland sufficient to enable him to seize horses ; and there could not have been much opportunity for plunder, by the troops, unless on the Neck, for the same controlling reason.