was a cheap conquest. Niagara, too, the shortest and best communication between Canada and Louisiana, is said to be ours, though this I doubt cannot be depended on. However, it is confidently said Colonel Gage marched with two thousand men against it, upwards of two months ago, and has taken it.
Guadaloupe, too, in the West Indies, is no mean acquisition; and I am in hopes, at the present date, the British cannon, in the West Indies, on Lake Champlain, and up St. Lawrence, are venting the resentments of an injured nation against the fortresses of Martinico, Crown Point, and Quebec. May this series of successes produce in our hearts such effects as they ought! May they lead us to repent and constrain us to obey.
I can give you no account of our families here, only that my brother is concerned in victualling the troops stationed on the south-western frontier of this colony, and that by his prudence and activity, and his spirited conduct as Lieutenant of Halifax county, he has greatly contributed to keep the remote inhabitants from abandoning their habitations, and thereby done no small service to his country!—that my cousin Peter this spring lost a son with the nervous fever, and that my cousin James, son of my uncle Francis by his second marriage, has had the misfortune to lose a fine parcel of slaves, which came by his mother, taken from him by a suit at law.
The measles, now epidemic almost all over this continent, has gone through my family lately (only two or three having escaped), without any other inconvenience than retarding our plantation business so much at a critical season of the year, that our crops and harvest are likely to suffer. The smallpox, too, is near us in some places.
