that you would
consider them, lest hunger should break through stone walls."

By midsummer the small hardships entailed by the British occupation of
Boston were most vexatious. "We shall very soon have no coffee, nor
sugar, nor pepper, but whortleberries and milk we are not obliged to
commerce for," she writes, and in letter after letter she begs for pins.
Needles are desperately needed, but without pins how can domestic life
go on, and not a pin in the province!

On the 14th of September she describes the excitement in Boston, the
Governor mounting cannon on Beacon Hill, digging intrenchments on the
Neck, planting guns, throwing up breastworks, encamping a regiment. In
consequence of the powder being taken from Charlestown, she goes on to
say, a general alarm spread through all the towns and was soon caught in
Braintree. And then she describes one of the most extraordinary scenes
in history. About eight o'clock on Sunday evening, she writes to her
husband, at least two hundred men, preceded by a horse-cart, passed by
her door in dead silence, and marched down to the powder-house, whence
they took out the town's powder, because they dared not trust it where
there were so many Tories, carried it into the other parish, and there
secreted it. On their way they captured a notorious "King's man," and
found on him two warrants aimed at the Commonwealth. When their
patriotic trust was discharged, they turned their attention to the
trembling Briton. Profoundly excited and indignant though they were,
they never thought of mob violence, but, true to the inherited instincts
of their race, they resolved themselves into a public meeting! The
hostile warrants being produced and exhibited, it was put to a vote
whether they should be burned or preserved. The majority voted for
burning them. Then the two hundred gathered in a circle round the single
lantern, and maintained a rigid silence while the offending papers were
consumed. That done--the blazing eyes in that grim circle of patriots
watching the blazing writs--"they called a vote whether they should
huzza; but, it being Sunday evening, it passed in the negative!"

Only in the New England of John Winthrop and the Mathers, of John Quincy
and the Adamses, would such a scene have been possible: a land of
self-conquest and self-control, of a deep love of the public welfare and
a willingness to take trouble for a public object.

A little later Mrs. Adams writes her husband that ther