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It was harder now, in one sense; four years as secretary to my kinsman, Sir Peter Coleville, had admitted me to those social intimacies so necessary to my secret office; and, alas! friendships had been made and ties formed not only in the line of duty, but from impulse and out of pure affection

I had never found it was required ofknown as disinterested and indifferent, and perhaps for that reason not suspected My friends were fro the loyalists--from choice, too, for I liked theainst their cause I worked, not against the perfidy in others; yet if it be perfidy to continue in duty as I understood duty, then I practised it, and at times could scarce tolerate myself, which was a weakness, because in my own heart I knew that his Excellency could set no man a task unworthy of his manhood Yet it were pleasanter had my duties thrown me with the army, or with Colonel Willett in my native north, whence, at his request, I had coue under the British cannon of New York--here in the household of Sir Peter Coleville, his secretary, his friend, his welcouest, the intimate of his fah for ht of what I was, and what they believed me to be, stabbed , not even the belief that God ith us, I fear, could have heldat the darkness in my restless bed--only blind faith in his Excellency that he would do no man this shame, if shame it was--that he kneell as I that the land's salvation was not to be secured through the barter ofsecured, as I say, and the heat of that July day abating nothing, though the sun hung low over Staten Island, I openeda table to the , prepared to write up that portion of lected lately, and which, when convenient opportunity offered, was to find its way into the hands of Colonel Marinus Willett in Albany Before I wrote I turned back a leaf or two so that I ht of later events; and I read rapidly: July 12, 1781--Nothing remarkable Very eather, and a bad odor fro the burned district T cannon have been e) I shall report caliber and particulars later