mong the eccentricities of the man was a disbelief in
Christianity,--much more of an anomaly in that day than at
present,--and a belief in the transmigration of souls, it
being one of his fancies that, after death, his spiritual
part was to return to this world in the form of a large
white horse.

On his release he did not join the army. Vermont had
declared itself an independent State in 1777, and sought
admittance to the Confederation. This New York opposed.
Allen took up the cause, visited Congress on the subject,
but found its members not inclined to offend the powerful
State of New York. There was danger of civil war in the
midst of the war for independence, and the English leaders,
seeing the state of affairs, tried to persuade Allen and the
other Green Mountain leaders to declare for the authority of
the king. They evidently did not know Ethan Allen. He was
far too sound a patriot to entertain for a moment such a
thought. The letters received by him he sent in 1782 to
Congress, and when the war ended Vermont was a part of the
Union, though not admitted as a State till 1791. Allen was
then dead, having been carried away suddenly by apoplexy in
1789.

THE BRITISH AT NEW YORK.

Before the days of dynamite and the other powerful
explosives which enable modern man to set at naught the most
rigid conditions of nature, warfare with the torpedo was
little thought of, gunpowder being a comparatively innocent
agent for this purpose. In the second period of the
Revolutionary War, when the British fleet had left Boston
and appeared in the harbor of New York, preparatory to an
attack on the latter city, the only methods devised by the
Americans for protection of the Hudson were sunken hulks in
the stream, _chevaux-de-frise_, composed of anchored logs,
and fire-ships prepared to float down on the foe. All these
proved of no avail. The current loosened the anchored logs,
so that they proved useless; the fire-ships did no damage;
and the batteries on shore were not able to hinder certain
ships of the enemy from running the gantlet of the city, and
ascending the Hudson to Tappan Sea, forty miles above. All
the service done by the fire-ships was to alarm the captains
of these bold cruisers, and induce them to run down the
river again, and rejoin the fleet at the Narrows.

It was at this juncture that an interesting event took
place, the first instance on record of the use of a
torpedo-vessel in warfare. A Connec