Theodore Winthrop

“ Skerrett made a circuit northward, crossed the Hudson at Newburgh, and reported to General Putnam, October 9, sunset, at the Van Wyck farm-house, on the plain, half a mile north of the Fishkill Mountains. The heights rose in front, a rampart a thousand feet high.
Old Put limped out to meet Washington’s aide-de-camp. He was a battered veteran, lame with a fractured thigh, stiff with coming paralysis and now despondent after recent blunders.
“Dusky times, Skerrett,” says he, forlornly. “I suppose the Chief sent you for men. He’s a cannibal after human flesh. ”

“ I get tired to death of the despondencies and prejudices and jealousies of some of these old women in breeches who wear swords or cast votes.”
“Perhaps you cannot spare me then to go to Peekskill,” the Major said, slyly.
His Country’s Father smiled. “Be off, my boy; but don’t stay too long. Your head will be worth more to Old Put than a regiment. He’s growing old. He shows the effects of tough campaigning in his youth. Besides, keeping a tavern was not the best business for a man of his convivial habits.” ”

“ There’s men enough that can squint along a barrel, and drop a redcoat, and sing out, ‘Hooray! another bully gone!’ — but not many, like my orderly, that can tell you why a redcoat has got to be a bully, and why we’re doing our duty to God and man by a droppin’ on ’em. ”

“ I’ve olluz understood from Deacons that the baird of a man cum in with Adam’s fall and waz to be shaved off. Naow I’d give a hul pie to know what Gineral Washington’s sent him on here for. It’s the greatest kind of a pity he didn’t come a few days before. That old granny, Gineral Putnam, wouldn’t hev let Sirr Henery Clinton grab them forts down to the Highlands, if he’d hed sech a young man as this to look arter him and spry him up.”
Before he continued his walk, Major Skerrett paused a moment for a long hearty draught of new October, — new American, a finer tipple than old English October. ”