“Nay, sir; his red coat is a standing blush to him, as it is to the whole scarlet-blushing British army.”  Then turning derisively upon the private:  “You object to my way of taking things, do ye?  I fear I shall never please ye.  You objected to the way, too, in which I took Ticonderoga, and the way in which I meant to take Montreal.  Selah!  But pray, now that I look at you, are not you the hero I caught dodging round, in his shirt, in the cattle-pen, inside the fort?  It was the break of day, you remember.”

“Come, Yankee,” here swore the incensed private; “cease this, or I’ll darn your old fawn-skins for ye with the flat of this sword;” for a specimen, laying it lashwise, but not heavily, across the captive’s back.

Turning like a tiger, the giant, catching the steel between his teeth, wrenched it from the private’s grasp, and striking it with his manacles, sent it spinning like a juggler’s dagger into the air, saying, “Lay your dirty coward’s iron on a tied gentleman again, and these,” lifting his handcuffed fists, “shall be the beetle of mortality to you!”

The now furious soldier would have struck him with all his force, but several men of the town interposed, reminding him that it were outrageous to attack a chained captive.

“Ah,” said Allen, “I am accustomed to that, and therefore I am beforehand with them; and the extremity of what I say against Britain, is not meant for you, kind friends, but for my insulters, present and to come.”  Then recognizing among the interposers the giver of the bowl, he turned with a courteous bow, saying, “Thank you again and again, my good sir; you may not be the worse for this; ours is an unstable world; so that one gentleman never knows when it may be his turn to be helped of another.”

But the soldier still making a riot, and the commotion growing general, a superior officer stepped up, who terminated the scene by remanding the prisoner to his cell, dismissing the townspeople, with all strangers, Israel among the rest, and closing the castle gates after them.

CHAPTER XXII.

SOMETHING FURTHER OF ETHAN ALLEN; WITH ISRAEL’S FLIGHT TOWARDS THE WILDERNESS.

Among the episodes of the Revolutionary War, none is stranger than that of Ethan Allen in England; the event and the man being equally uncommon.

Allen seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer; had a person like the Belgian giants; mountain music in him like a Swiss; a heart plump as Coeur de Lion’s.  Though born in New England, he exhibited no trace of her character.  He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest.  His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be), the true American one.