328 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

shot poorly. The writer was looking on, when one of the officers, after loading his gun, asked me whether I would try a shot. I replied in the affirmative, and, presenting the piece at arms’ length, fired. The servant signalled the ball as having struck the bull’s-eye. The party looked at me with surprise and indignation, and exclaimed: “Tis no wonder the d__d rebels kill our men as they dohere is a boy who beats us!' I told them I could do it again, and left them to cogitate on the subject.”

HORSE RACING—A jockey or racing club was formed in the year 1780, within the British lines. Bryant Connor, of New York, was Chief Jockey. Flatland Plain, then called “Ascot Heath,” was the race-course; it was then a beautiful open plain, well adapted for racing or parades. Public races were held here until October, 1783. The British officers, with the refugees and Tories, ruled the course. The American officers, then prisoners in Kings County, attended these races, and were frequently insulted by the loyalists, which gave rise to frequent fracases. Wherever a fine horse was known to be owned by any American farmer in the county, the refugee horsethieves would soon put him into the hands of the jockeys, and the course was thus kept well supplied. General Johnson saw a New Jersey farmer claim a horse on Ascot Heath, in October, 1783, which had been purchased by Mr. John Cornell, of Brooklyn, from a refugee, and entered for the race. The owner permitted the horse to run the race; after which, Mr. Cornell surrendered the animal to the owner in a gentlemanly manner. Whether he ever found the thief afterwards is uncertain.1

A MILITARY EXECUTION AT BROOKLYN—In the summer of 1782, three men, named Porter, Tench, and Parrot, members of the 54th Regiment, then encamped on the farm of Martin Schenck, at the Wallabout, were arrested and tried for their complicity in a foul murder committed on Bennet’s Point, in Newtown, three years before. They were sentenced to be hung, but Parrot was pardoned

1 In 1784, public races were ran at New York, on the level of Division street. In the same year, Governor George Clinton (who assumed, though erroneously, that “it be. longed to him as an official franchise”) leased Governor's Island to a Dr. Price, who built a hotel there and graded a handsome course on the same, on which races were run in 1785 and Õ86. Afterwards they were hold at Harlem, Newmarket, Beaver Pond, New Utrecht, and on the Union Course.