of New York for nearly seven months, and had in it at times above forty thousand men, neither of these libraries was ever meddled with, the telescope which General Washington took excepted."
The great fire left its blight upon the street, although its track was to the west of Broadway. The ghostly spectacle on the site of Old Trinity was constantly before the Wall Street eye for the next eight years. The Wall Street Presbyterian church, in which Whitfield had once poured forth the torrent of his eloquence, was uninjured by the flames; but it was shortly converted into a hospital for the British soldiers.
The winter of 1779-1780 was one of the most cheerless and severely cold ever known in New York latitude. The snow began to fall about the 10th of November, and continued to fall, attended by piercing winds, nearly every day till the middle of the ensuing March. In the woods the snow lay at least four feet upon a level, and it was with the utmost difficulty that trees were extricated for fire-wood after being felled. The distress occasioned by the scarcity of fuel was terrible. Poor people burned fat to cook their meals, gardens and fields were shorn of their ornamental and fruit trees for firewood—apple trees, peach trees, plum trees, cherry trees, and pear trees were ruthlessly chopped down on every hand. The situation seemed to justify the proceeding, and owners made no complaints. The beautiful shade trees in Wall Street, some of them a century old, were sacrificed, felled indiscriminately, and consumed in the Wall Street kitchens. Provisions became so costly as to exhaust the purses of the rich. Fifty dollars would hardly feed a family two days. The British generals implored the farmers of Long Island and vicinity to bring their produce into the city, but they paid little heed to the prayer. The Hudson was frozen so solid that an army, "with the heaviest artillery might have crossed it on the ice. One of the writers of the day tells us that the whole river from New York Bay to Albany was "mere terra firma." And the ice was equally thick and strong in the East River. The Sound at New Haven was frozen across " the whole thirty miles to the Long Island shore, with the exception of about two miles in the middle." No man living had ever before seen New York Bay frozen over from the city to Staten Island; but now more than two hundred heavily laden two-horse sleighs crossed on the ice in a body at one time, escorted by two hundred horsemen. The British men-of-war in the harbor were hopelessly ice-bound and could not move.
Sir Henry Clinton went south in December to reduce Charleston, leaving Knyphausen in command at New York, a rough, taciturn old veteran, the commander-in-chief of the German forces, who had served his prince in
