Page:The Adventures Of A Revolutionary Soldier.pdf/196

194 and the upper room—large enough to accommodate two or three regiments.

Levity and Folly are twin sisters, and are restive jades; when they are yoked together in the same vehicle and have Indiscretion for a driver, they will very often draw a man into wild and ridiculous scrapes, as I know by experience. They run me into one about this time, which I will relate, as I think it an "adventure," and a "suffering," though a foolish one, such an one as I shall not easily forget, if it should not seem of much consequence to any one but myself.

Several of our men, and myself among the rest, by permission of our officers, took a boat one day and went to the western side of the river for the purpose of gathering chessnuts. Two or three miles above West point is a remarkable mountain, jutting quite into the river, called Butter hill, from the colour of the rocks that compose it, which are of a yellowish hue. The end of the mountain next the river is almost perpendicular, and in many places quite so; it runs off gradually to the westward where it is on all sides easy of ascent. Not finding the nuts so plenty as I wished or expected, and being drawn on by the two nags I have mentioned above, I took it into my head to leave my associates and climb this mountain, where I expected to have a prospect of the country around me that would compensate me for all my trouble in climbing the hill, and then by going along on the top I could descend it with ease. My mates tried to dissuade me from the undertaking, but no, I was determined to go, and go I did—a part of the way—I clambered up, sometimes upon my hands and knees, and sometimes pulling myself up by the small bushes that grew in the cliffs of the rocks; passing many places in imminent danger of falling; passing round crags of rocks on the very edges of frightful precipices, not daring to look back; when, after I had ascended perhaps five or six hundred feet, and thought I had nearly obtained my object, I arrived at a spot where I was completely gravelled, and could go no farther one way or the other; I then had to stop of course, and ventured to look back, being forced to do so; I saw the tall trees below me in the valley, reduced in size to whortleberry bushes. I sat down on a crag of the rock, which was hardly broad enough