The British fired the village and
retreated. We pursued until dark. The next morning my arm was so
swollen that it _could_ not, or at least was not put right, and
it has been ever since a weak, feeble joint, which has disabled me
from most kinds of manual labor."
To this account the grandson of Thomas Stone, the Rev. Hiram Stone,
adds some notes, in one of which he says, speaking of the Sugar House:
"I have repeatedly heard my grandfather relate that there were no
windows left in the building, and that during the winter season the
snow would be driven entirely across the great rooms in the different
stories, and in the morning lie in drifts upon our poor, hungry,
unprotected prisoners. Of a morning several frozen corpses would be
dragged out, thrown into wagons like logs, then driven away and
pitched into a large hole or trench, and covered up like dead brutes."
Speaking of the custom of sending the exchanged prisoners as far as
possible from their own homes, he says: "I well remember hearing my
grandfather explain this strange conduct of the enemy in the following
way. Alter the poison was thus perfidiously administered, the
prisoners belonging at the North were sent across to the Jersey side,
while those of the South were sent in an opposite direction, the
intention of the enemy evidently being to send the exchanged prisoners
as far from home as possible, that most of them might die of the
effect of the poison before reaching their friends.
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