138 Life of Count Rumford. 



graves levelled, and the tombstones used for building their fire- 

 places and ovens. The writer has often heard old men testify, 

 from the evidence of their own senses, that they had. seen the 

 loaves of bread drawn out of these ovens with the reversed 

 inscription of the tombstones of their friends on the lower 

 crust. 



" The redoubtable commander in these sacrilegious proceed- 

 ings was Colonel Benjamin Thompson, a native of Massachu- 

 setts, and the same man that was afterwards created by the 

 Duke of Bavaria and known to the world as Count Rumford. 

 But his acts in this place have given him an immortality which 

 all his military exploits, his philosophical disquisitions, and scien- 

 tific discoveries, will never secure to him among the descendants 

 of this outraged community." 



Mr. Prime says that his grandfather, " the aged pastor 

 of the congregation," was peculiarly obnoxious to the 

 British as an " old rebel," and that when the soldiers 

 first came to the place they treated him with special 

 indignity, littering the stable with valuable books from 

 his library. Some of these books were lying before the 

 historian as he wrote, " with the impress of the same 

 savage hands." The Rev. Ebenezer Prime, the min- 

 ister here referred to, died in 1779, so that Colonel 

 Thompson was not a party to this offence. 



I have not assumed the championship of Colonel 

 Thompson as a soldier, even independently of his 

 espousal of the side in which he appears against his 

 native country. He may have been responsible for all 

 that is here charged against him as a matter of fact, but I 

 there are no adequate grounds for ascribing to him I 

 malignity of motive in the acts done under his com- 

 mand. The people of Long Island suffered especial 

 hardships and exactions during the Revolutionary strug- 

 gle. After the disastrous affair to our forces which 



