Chapter 22

SOMETHING FURTHER OF ETHAN ALLEN; WITH ISRAEL'S FLIGHT TOWARDS THE
WILDERNESS.

Among the episodes of the Revolutionary War, none is stranger than that
of Ethan Allen in England; the event and the man being equally uncommon.

Allen seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe
Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer; had a person like the Belgian giants;
mountain music in him like a Swiss; a heart plump as Coeur de Lion's.
Though born in New England, he exhibited no trace of her character. He
was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty
as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his
peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no
other is, or can be), the true American one.

For the most part, Allen's manner while in England was scornful and
ferocious in the last degree; however, qualified by that wild, heroic
sort of levity, which in the hour of oppression or peril seems
inseparable from a nature like his; the mode whereby such a temper best
evinces its barbaric disdain of adversity, and how cheaply and
waggishly it holds the malice, even though triumphant, of its foes!
Aside from that inevitable egotism relatively pertaining to pine trees,
spires, and giants, there were, perhaps, two special incidental reasons
for the Titanic Vermonter's singular demeanor abroad. Taken captive
while heading a forlorn hope before Montreal, he was treated with
inexcusable cruelty and indignity; something as if he had fallen into
the hands of the Dyaks. Immediately upon his capture he would have been
deliberately suffered to have been butchered by the Indian allies in
cold blood on the spot, had he not, with desperate intrepidity, availed
himself of his enormous physical strength, by twitching a British
officer to him, and using him for a living target, whirling him round
and round against the murderous tomahawks of the savages. Shortly
afterwards, led into the town, fenced about by bayonets of the guard,
the commander of the enemy, one Colonel McCloud, flourished his cane
over the captive's head, with brutal insults promising him a rebel's
halter at Tyburn. During his passage to England in the same ship wherein
went passenger Colonel Guy Johnson, the implacable tory, he was kept
heavily ironed in the hold, and in all ways treated as a common
mutineer; or, it may be, rather as a lion of Asia; which, though caged,
was still too dreadful to behold without fear and trembling, and
consequent cruelty. And no wonder, at least for the fear; for on one
occasion, when chained hand and foot, he was insulted on shipboard by an
officer; with his teeth he twisted off the nail that went through the
mortise of his handcuffs, and so, having his arms at