Page:The Adventures Of A Revolutionary Soldier.pdf/49

Rh We staid here but a short time, and then marched to Peekskill, on the Hudson river, and encamped in the edge of the Highlands, at a place called Old Orchard; here we were tormented by the whip-poor-wills. A potent enemy! says the reader. Well, a potent enemy they were,—particularly to our rest at night;—they would begin their imposing music in the twilight and continue it till ten or eleven o'clock, and commence again before the dawn, when they would be in a continual roar. No man, unless he were stupified, could get a wink of sleep during the serenade, which, in the short nights in the month of May, was almost the whole of the night.

I was one day, while lying here, upon what was called a camp guard;—we kept a considerable chain of sentinels. In the night there came, what in military phrase is called the visiting rounds, which is, an officer attended by a small escort, to inspect the condition of the guards, and see that they do their duty. The officer, at the time I mention, was a field officer, a young man; he went to the extreme end of the line of sentinels and began his examination;—one sentry, he found, who had stowed himself away snugly in an old papermill; another had left his post to procure a draught of milk from the cows in a farmer's yard, and others were found, here and there, neglecting their duty. He brought off all the delinquents to deliver them up to the righteous sentence of a court-martial. In his progress he came to me, I being at the time on sentry too. I hailed him and demanded of him the countersign, which he regularly gave me and passed on. I did not expect to hear any thing further about it, as I concluded that I had done my duty to perfection. In the morning, before guard relieving, I happened to be posted at the Colonel's marque-door, when the above-mentioned officer came into the tent, and was telling some of our officers the consequences of his last night's expedition. I listened attentively to his recital. "At last," said he, "I came to a sentinel who challenged me like a man; I thought I had found a soldier after detecting so many scoundrels; but what think ye!—as soon as I had given him the countersign, the puppy shouldered his piece, and had I been an enemy I could have knocked his brains out." At the first part of his recital, I grew