of two thousand caroli.  It was then labelled with its owner’s name, and thrown into the city of Harlem.  At the same time a new gibbet was erected in the Spanish camp before the city, in a conspicuous situation, upon which all the prisoners were hanged, some by the neck, some by the heels, in full view of their countrymen.  As usual, this especial act of cruelty excited the emulation of the citizens.  Two of the old board of magistrates, belonging to the Spanish party, were still imprisoned at Harlem; together with seven other persons, among whom was a priest and a boy of twelve years.  They were now condemned to the gallows.  The wife of one of the ex-burgomasters and his daughter, who was a beguin, went by his side as he was led to execution, piously exhorting him to sustain with courage the execrations of the populace and his ignominious doom.  The rabble, irritated by such boldness, were not satisfied with wreaking their vengeance on the principal victims, but after the execution had taken place they hunted the wife and daughter into 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.