have the temerity to mention the king in his supplications. But with unfaltering courage Mr. Inglis proceeded to the end of the service, omitting no portion of it, and received no personal injury. The vestry of the church compromised with the angry revolutionists by agreeing to close the Episcopal churches of the city altogether for the present. It proved to be the last public religious service ever held in the old Trinity edifice, which was reduced to a heap of unsightly ruins in the great fire of 1776.
Another exciting scene in Wall Street was at the reading of the Declaration of Independence, by order of the New York Congress, at White Plains, July 18, 1776. This document had been read at the head of each brigade of the Continental army on the 10th, by direction of Washington, and the destruction of the equestrian statue of King George at the Bowling Green was on the evening of same day. But the ceremony at the City Hall was an emphatic expression of New York in particular, and the more notable from the fact that the ships of the enemy had actually arrived and anchored in the harbor; and for twenty-four hours prior to the event, women, children, and infirm persons were, through Washington's advice, being hurried from the city in anticipation of a bloody conflict. The newspapers of the day chronicle the presence of thousands of listeners to the reading, who filled the air with huzzas of joy, and then burned the king's coat-of-arms in a huge bonfire kindled for the purpose, having torn the tablet from the wall of the old structure.
With the occupation of New York by the British, Wall Street residences were many of them vacated by their owners and inhabited by the red-coated officers. Judge Jones tells us that the British soldiers "broke open the City Hall, and plundered it of the college library, its mathematical and philosophical apparatus, and a number of valuable pictures, all of which had been removed there by way of safety when the rebels converted the college into a hospital. They also plundered it of all the books belonging to the subscription library, as also of a valuable library belonging to the corporation, the whole consisting of not less than sixty thousand volumes. "This", he says, "was done with impunity, and the books publicly hawked about the town for sale by private soldiers, their trulls and doxeys. I saw an Annual Register neatly bound and lettered, sold for a dram. Freeman's Reports for a shilling, and Coke's First Institutes, or what is usually called Coke upon Littleton, was offered to me for 1s. 6d. I saw in a public house upon Long Island nearly forty books bound and lettered, in which were affixed the arms of Joseph Murray, Esq., under pawn from one dram to three drams each." Judge Jones further says: "To do justice even to rebels, let it be here mentioned that though they were in full possession
