vard, and after studying with Doctor Pynchon rose to considerable
eminence as a physician and particularly as a surgeon. Besides talents
and genius of a sort, he was endowed with a rare poetic fancy, many of
his verses being full of daintiness as well as of a very pretty wit. He
was, however, somewhat extravagant in his habits, and about 1768 had
built himself an elegant country house near Boston. It was to sustain
this, it is believed, that he sold himself to the king's cause.

To all appearance, however, Church was up to the very hour of his
detection one of the leading patriots of the time. He had been chosen to
deliver the oration in the Old South Meeting-House on March 5, 1773, and
he there pronounced a stirring discourse, which has still power to
thrill the reader, upon the massacre the day celebrates, and the love of
liberty which inspired the patriots' revolt on that memorable occasion.
Yet two years earlier, as we have since discovered from a letter of
Governor Hutchinson, he had been anonymously employing his venal pen in
the service of the government!

In 1774, when he was a member of the Provincial Congress, he was first
suspected of communication with Gage, and of receiving a reward for his
treachery. Paul Revere has written concerning this: "In the fall of '74
and the winter of '75 I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics,
who formed themselves into a committee for the purpose of watching the
movements of the British soldiers and gaining every intelligence of the
Tories. We held our meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern. This committee
were astonished to find all their secrets known to General Gage,
although every time they met every member swore not to reveal any of
their transactions except to Hancock, Adams, Warren, Otis, Church, and
one or two others."

The traitor, of course, proved to be Doctor Church. One of his students
who kept his books and knew of his money embarrassment first mistrusted
him. Only treachery, he felt, could account for his master's sudden
acquisition of some hundreds of new British guineas.

The doctor was called before a council of war consisting of all the
major-generals and brigadiers of the army, beside the adjutant-general,
Washington himself presiding. This tribunal decided that Church's acts
had been criminal, but remanded him for the decision of the General
Court, of which he was a member. He was taken in a chaise, escorted by
General Gates and a guard of twenty