the water, where they both perished.  It is right to record these instances of cruelty, sometimes perpetrated by the patriots as well as by their oppressors—­a cruelty rendered almost inevitable by the incredible barbarity of the foreign invader.  It was a war of wolfish malignity.  In the words of Mendoza, every man within and without Harlem “seemed inspired by a spirit of special and personal vengeance.”  The innocent blood poured out in Mechlin, Zutphen, Naarden, and upon a thousand scaffolds, had been crying too long from the ground.  The Hollanders must have been more or less than men not to be sometimes betrayed into acts which justice and reason must denounce. [No!  It was as evil for one side as the other.  D.W.]

The singular mood which has been recorded of a high-spirited officer of the garrison, Captain Corey, illustrated the horror with which such scenes of carnage were regarded by noble natures.  Of a gentle disposition originally, but inflamed almost to insanity by a contemplation of Spanish cruelty, he had taken up the profession of arms, to which he had a natural repugnance.  Brave to recklessness, he led his men on every daring outbreak, on every perilous midnight adventure.  Armed only with his rapier, without defensive armor, he was ever found where the battle raged most fiercely, and numerous were the victims who fell before his sword.  On returning, however, from such excursions, he invariably shut himself in his quarters, took to his bed, and lay for days, sick with remorse, and bitterly lamenting all that bloodshed in which he had so deeply participated, and which a cruel fate seemed to render necessary.  As the gentle mood subsided, his frenzy would return, and again he would rush to the field, to seek new havoc and fresh victims for his rage.

The combats before the walls were of almost daily occurrence.  On the 25th March, one thousand of the besieged made a brilliant sally, drove in all the outposts of the enemy, burned three hundred tents, and captured seven cannon, nine standards, and many wagon-loads of provisions, all which they succeeded in bringing with them into the city.—­Having thus reinforced themselves, in a manner not often practised by the citizens of a beleaguered town, in the very face of thirty thousand veterans—­having killed eight hundred of the enemy, which was nearly one for every man engaged, while they lost but four of their own party—­the Harlemers, on their return, erected a trophy of funereal but exulting aspect.  A mound of earth was constructed upon the ramparts, in the form of a colossal grave, in full view of the enemy’s camp, and upon it were planted the cannon and standards so gallantly won in the skirmish, with the taunting inscription floating from the centre of the mound “Harlem is the graveyard of the Spaniards.”