quest so grateful to me. Impute not my silence to a want of due regard to you, or an indifference in keeping up a correspondence with you. I have, since my last to you, removed forty miles further southward than I then lived, which renders my writing to you more difficult than formerly. But as the motive that carried me thither, i. e., the keeping my place, which is become, on account of our present troubles, of little value, has no longer any weight in it, I have (Deo volente) determined (unless the times shortly change for the better, which, from the appearance of things we have but little, and from our own deserts no reason at all to hope) shortly to remove to my little seat in Hanover, where I propose to employ my small abilities in the education of my three boys, which I shall have the more leisure to attend to after having quitted every kind of public business, and the many avocations which are now a bar to such an employment; though I fear our distresses, unless it please God to put a speedy stop to them, may prove an interruption to every occupation in every part of this poor infant colony. We are here so utterly unacquainted with military matters, that we all, from the legislator to the meanest handicraftsman, are at a stand. All the measures we have fallen upon seem ineffectual, and answer no other end than to plunge us in debt, insomuch that the credit of the country is almost sunk; and from the inexperience of the managers, our expeditions have proved not only abortive, but disgraceful. The miscarriages in all our enterprises have rendered us a reproach, and to the last degree contemptible in the eyes of our savage Indian, and much more inhuman French enemies.
Those of the Indians that call themselves our friends despise us, and in their march through our inhabited country,
