dred and fifty-nine prisoners, doing no damage, and even failing to secure the objectionable Van Buskirk, the capture, almost in the face of the British garrison of New York, was so impudent that Congress effusively thanked everybody concerned, voted Lee a gold medal "emblematical of this affair," and ordered fifteen thousand dollars to be distributed among the attacking party.
There is more human interest now in recalling that it was down what is now Bergen Avenue that Sergeant-Major John Champe galloped, pursued by his own comrades as a deserter, to escape to the British lines and kidnap Arnold, in order to deliver the traitor up to Washington, and to justify the American commander in liberating Andre. Champe's escape was narrowly successful, but, as we all know, he missed the main object of his pretended desertion. He found it harder to leave his new friends than his old, and had to go soldiering about in Virginia under Cornwallis, poor man! before he had an opportunity to make a real desertion.
If Bergen was happy and tiresome for the hundred years following the English acquisition of New Jersey,
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MUSIC HALL AT SHORT HILLS, NEW JERSEY.
there were other places less fortunate and more interesting. Elizabeth Town and Perth Amboy became in succession the political centres of East Jersey after Carteret and Berkeley, "in consideration of a competent sum of money," received a grant of the land between the Hudson and the Delaware. All New-Jerseymen may be assumed to be aware that the State owes its name to the fact that Sir George Carteret was an Old-Jerseyman. The local historians, however, accept without question a loose tradition that Elizabeth was named after his wife. It seems more likely that it owes its name to the same loyal pride which led the old gentleman to bestow the name of the Channel island upon the American province. For not only was Jersey the last of the dominions of Great Britain, home or foreign, to come into Cromwell's obedience, but it was Elizabeth Castle which was actually the last place to haul down the Stuart flag, after Sir George had sustained in it a siege of three months from the forces of the Protector, and, even then, surrendered only after he had received from Paris the orders of the exiled king to make the best conditions he could. "It had been," says Clarendon, "the principal reason that Cromwell bad hitherto kept the better quarter with the
