'Which of the ten tribes are the Swiss ?'" Nor was this an unnatural remark.

At this time Mr.Gallatin did not speak English with facility, and indeed was never free from a foreign accent.
At the little cafe they met a Swiss woman, the wife of a Genevan, one De Lesdernier, who had been for thirty years established in Nova Scotia, but, becoming compromised in the attempt to revolutionize the colony, was compelled to fly to New England, and had settled at Machias, on the northeastern extremity of the Maine frontier.

Tempted by her account of this region, and perhaps making a virtue of necessity, Gallatin and Serre bartered their tea for rum, sugar, and tobacco, and, investing the remainder of their petty capital in similar merchandise, they embarked October 1, 1780, upon a small coasting vessel, which, after a long and somewhat perilous passage, reached the mouth of the Machias River on the 15th of the same month.

Machias was then a little settlement five miles from the mouth of the stream of the same name.

It consisted of about twenty houses and a small fortification, mounting seven guns and garrisoned by fifteen or twenty men.