For nearly two years he suffered the most horrible tortures in prisons and prison ships. He seemed to have been forgotten.
For weeks at a time he was absolutely silent, no one being allowed to speak to him, and silence was strictly enforced among the prisoners.
Once Allen got a little paper and a pencil, and a friendly jailer promised to have the letter sent to its destination.
Allen addressed it to his brother at Bennington, in the Green Mountains, and it duly reached its destination, but the brother was away with the patriot army, the letter was kept, however, and read over and over again by the old friends of the hero of Ticonderoga.
In that letter he says:
"I have seen American patriot prisoners begging for food and being laughed at for their request. They have bitten pieces of wood to get little chips to eat and so satisfy their hunger. I was imprisoned for a time in a church, watched over by Hessians who would not let us leave to satisfy the wants of nature, and mid excrements the poor wretches, who only loved their country, died in horrible tortures."
It was a wonder that the letter ever reached Bennington, but the jailer who passed it out was a warm-hearted man, a son of the soil from Ireland.
It was in the early spring of 1778 that Allen heard his name called as he sat in the hold of a war ship lying off New York.
He dragged his legs wearily up the steps to the deck.
He had aged much during those two years, and his friends would scarcely have known him.