Hamilton had a horse at times, at others not.  But his vitality was proof against even those endless days and nights of marching and countermarching, through forests and swamps, in the worst of late autumn and winter weather; and he kept up the spirits of his little regiment, now reduced from bullets, exposure, and the expiration of service to thirty men.  Nevertheless, he held the British in check at the Raritan River while the Americans destroyed the bridge, and when Washington, after having crossed the Delaware, determined to recross it on Christmas night and storm Trenton, he was one of the first to be chosen, with what remained of his men and guns.

As they crossed the Delaware that bitter night, the snow stinging and blinding, the river choked with blocks of ice, Hamilton for the first time thought on St. Croix with a pang of envy.  But it was the night for their purpose, and all the world knows the result.  The victory was followed on the 3d of January by the capture of Princeton; and here Hamilton’s active military career came to an end for the present.

Well do I recollect the day [wrote a contemporary] when Hamilton’s company marched into Princeton.  It was a model of discipline.  At their head was a boy, and I wondered at his youth; but what was my surprise, when, struck with his slight figure, he was pointed out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had heard so much.

I noticed [a veteran officer said many years after] a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery, with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, apparently lost in thought; with his hand resting on a cannon, and every now and again patting it as if it were a favourite horse or a pet plaything.

BOOK III

THE LITTLE LION

I

Hamilton’s body succumbed to the climax of Trenton and Princeton upon months of hardship and exposure, and he was in hospital for a week with a rheumatic fever.  But Troup, whose exchange had been effected, was with him most of the time, and his convalescence was made agreeable by many charming women.  He was not the only brilliant young man in the army, for Troup, Fish, Burr, Marshall, were within a few months or, at most, a year or two of his age, and there were many others; men had matured early in that hot period before the Revolution, when small boys talked politics, and even the women thought of little else; but Hamilton, through no fault of his, had inspired his friends with the belief that he was something higher than human, and they never tired of sounding his praises.  Moreover, Washington had not hesitated to say what he thought of him, and the mere fact that he had won the affection of that austere Chieftain was enough to give him celebrity.  At all events, he was a dazzling figure, and pretty women soothed many a weary hour.  As for Troup, who was unpleasantly anatomical, he had a fresh story for every day of the horrors of the prison cattle-ship Mentor, where half the prisoners had died of filth, starvation, and fever, from putrid water and brutal treatment.