fell eight of the British. Here Pitcairn for safety was forced to quit his horse, which was taken with his pistols in their holsters. A little farther on, Jonathan Wilson, captain of the Bedford minute-men, too zealous to keep on his guard, was killed by a flanking party. At another defile in Lincoln, the minute-men of Lexington, commanded by John Parker, renewed the fight. Every piece of wood, every rock by the wayside, served as a lurking-place. Scarce ten of the Americans were at any time seen together; yet the hills seemed to the British to swarm with "rebels," as if they had dropped from the clouds, and "the road was lined" by an unintermitted fire from behind stone walls and trees.

At first the invaders moved in order; as they drew near Lexington, their flanking parties became ineffective from weariness; the wounded were scarce able to get forward. In the west of Lexington, as the British were rising Fiske's hill, a sharp contest ensued. It was at the eastern foot of the same hill that James Hayward, of Acton, encountered a regular, and both at the same moment fired; the regular dropped dead; Hayward was mortally wounded. A little farther on fell the octogenarian, Josiah Haynes, who had kept pace with the swiftest in the pursuit.

The British troops, "greatly exhausted and fatigued, and having expended almost all their ammunition," began to run rather than retreat in order. The officers vainly attempted to stop their flight. "They were driven before the Americans like sheep." At last, about two in the afternoon, after they had hurried through the middle of the town, about a mile below the field of the morning's bloodshed, the officers made their way to the front, and by menaces of death began to form them under a very heavy fire.

At that moment Lord Percy came in sight with the first brigade, consisting of Welsh fusileers, the fourth, the fortyseventh, and the thirty-eighth regiments, in all about twelve hundred men, with two field-pieces. Insolent as usual, they marched out of Boston to the tune of Yankee Doodle; but they grew alarmed at finding every house on the road deserted. They met not one person to give them tidings of the party whom they were sent to rescue; and now that they

had made the junction, they could think only of their own safety.

While the cannon kept the Americans at bay, Percy formed his detachment into a square, enclosing the fugitives, who lay down for rest on the ground, "their tongues hanging out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase."

After the junction of the fugitives with Percy, the troops under his command amounted to fully two thirds of the British army in Boston; and yet they must fly before the Americans speedily and fleetly, or be overwhelmed. Two wagons, sent out to them with supplies, were waylaid and captured by Payson, the minister of Chelsea. From far and wide minute-men were gathering. The men of Dedham, even the old men, received their minister's blessing and went forth, in such numbers that scarce one male between sixteen and seventy was left at home. That morning William Prescott mustered his regiment; and, though Pepperell was so remote that he could not be in season for the pursuit, he hastened down with five companies of guards. Before noon a messenger rode at full speed into Worcester, crying, "To arms!" A fresh horse was brought, and the tidings went on, while the minute-men of that town, after joining hurriedly on the common in a fervent prayer from their minister, kept on the march till they reached Cambridge.

Aware of his perilous position, Percy, resting but half an hour, renewed the retreat. The light infantry marched in front, the grenadiers next, while the first brigade, which furnished the very strong flanking parties, brought up the rear. They were exposed to a fire on each side, in front, and from behind. The Americans, who were good marksmen, would lie down concealed to load their guns at one place, and discharge them at another, running from front to flank, and from flank to rear. Rage and revenge and shame at their flight led the regulars to plunder houses by the wayside, to destroy in wantonness windows and furniture, to set fire to barns and houses.

Beyond Lexington the troops were attacked by men chiefly from Essex and the lower towns. The fire from the rebels slackened till they approached West Cambridge, where Joseph Warren and William Heath, both of the committee of safety,

the latter a provincial general officer, gave for a moment some appearance of organization to the pursuit, and the fight grew sharper and more determined. Here the company from Danvers, which made a breastwork of a pile of shingles, lost eight men, caught between the enemy's flank guard and main body. Here, too, a musket-ball grazed the hair of Joseph Warren, whose heart beat to arms, so that he was ever in the place of greatest danger. The British became more and more "exasperated," and indulged themselves in savage cruelty. In one house they found two aged, helpless, unarmed men, and butchered them both without mercy, stabbing them, breaking their skulls, and dashing out their brains. Hannah Adams, wife of Deacon Joseph Adams, of Cambridge, lay in child-bed with a babe of a week old, but was forced to crawl with her infant in her arms and almost naked to a corn-shed, while the soldiers set her house on fire. At Cambridge, an idiot, perched on a fence to gaze at the British army, was wantonly shot at and killed. Of the Americans, there were never more than four hundred together at any one time; but, as some grew tired or used up their ammunition, others took their places; and, though there was not much concert or discipline, and no attack with masses, the pursuit never flagged.

Below West Cambridge the militia from Dorchester, Roxbury, and Brookline came up. Of these, Isaac Gardner, of the latter place, one on whom the colony rested many hopes, fell about a mile west of Harvard college. The field-pieces began to lose their terror, so that the Americans pressed upon the rear of the fugitives, whose retreat was as rapid as it possibly could be. A little after sunset the survivors escaped across Charlestown neck.

The troops of Percy had marched thirty miles in ten hours; the party of Smith, in six hours, had retreated twenty miles; the guns of the ships-of-war and the menace to burn the town of Charlestown saved them from annoyance during their rest on Bunker Hill, and while they were ferried across Charles river.

On that day forty-nine Americans were killed, thirty-four wounded, and five missing. The loss of the British in killed, wounded, and missing, was two hundred and seventy-three.

Among the wounded were many officers; Smith was hurt severely. Many more were disabled by fatigue.

All the following night the men of Massachusetts streamed in from scores of miles around, old men as well as young. They had scarce a semblance of artillery or warlike stores, no powder, nor organization, nor provisions; but there they were, thousands with brave hearts, determined to rescue the liberties of their country. "The night preceding the outrages at Lexington there were not fifty people in the whole colony that ever expected any blood would be shed in the contest;" the night after, the king's governor and the king's army found themselves closely beleaguered in Boston.

"The next news from England must be conciliatory, or the connection between us ends," said Warren. "This month," so William Emerson of Concord, late chaplain to the provincial congress, chronicled in a blank leaf of his almanac, "is remarkable for the greatest events of the present age." "From the nineteenth of April 1775," said Clark, of Lexington, on its first anniversary, "will be dated the liberty of the American world."

CHAPTER XI.

EFFECTS OF THE DAY OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD.
THE GENERAL RISING.

APRIL-JUNE 1775.

DARKNESS closed upon the country and upon the town, but it was no night for sleep. Heralds by swift relays transmitted the war message from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands; and it was never suffered to droop till it had been borne north and south, and east and west, throughout the land. It spread over the bays that received the Saco and the Penobscot and the St. John's. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and, ringing like buglenotes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliffs of Quebec. The hills along the Hudson told one to another the tale. As the summons hurried to the south, it was one day at New York; in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp to Nansemond along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onward and still onward through boundless forests of pines to Newbern and to Wilmington. "For God's sake, forward it by night and by day," wrote Cornelius Harnett by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border, and despatched it to Charleston, and through moss-clad live oaks