When Champe was with the British in New York, he, according to Lee and as appears above, refused to enlist in the enemy's forces; but there is another account which says that when he arrived in New York "he was placed in the company of Captain Cameron." In the Champe family is the tradition that he wrote to Lee of this:
"I was yesterday compelled to a most affecting step, but one indispensable the success of my plan. It was necessary for me to accept a commission in the traitor's legion that I might have uninterrupted access to his house."
This Captain Cameron, after the termination of the war, married in Virginia and fortunately kept a diary, a part of which was published in _The British United Service Journal_. From it we learn, through Howe,[120] that Cameron had occasion to traverse the forests of Loudoun with a single servant and--familiar touch--was caught in one of those violent thunderstorms so characteristic of upper Piedmont. Night came on, no habitation or shelter of any kind was discernible to our travellers in that wilderness and, believing themselves in grave peril, they were becoming really alarmed when they saw through the woods a faint light. Riding toward it, they discovered it came from one of the typical log-houses of a frontier clearing and they lost no time in seeking shelter. The owner of the little home received them with true backwoods hospitality. And now quoting from Captain Cameron's journal:
[120] _Historic Collections of Virginia_, by Henry Howe, 1849.
"He would not permit either master or man to think of their horses, but insisted that we should enter the house, where fire and changes of apparel awaited us, he himself led the jaded animals to a shed, rubbed them down and provided them with forage. It would have been affectation of the worst kind to dispute his pleasure in this instance, so I readily sought the shelter of his roof, to which a comely dame bade me welcome, and busied herself in preventing my wishes. My drenched uniform was exchanged for a suit of my host's apparel; my servant was accomodated in the same manner, and we soon afterwards found ourselves seated before a blazing fire of wood, by the light of which our hostess assiduously laid out a well-stocked supper table. I need not say that all this was in the highest degree comfortable. Yet I was not destined to sit down to supper without discovering still greater cause for wonder. In due time our host returned and the first glance which I cast towards him satisfied me that he was no stranger. The second set everything like doubt at rest. Sergeant Champe stood before me; the same in complexion, in feature, though somewhat less thoughtful in the expression of his eye, as when he first joined my company in New York.