en for that of Fire, and there was a moment's
panic. We have opposing accounts of it.

"It was imagined," wrote our discontented Lieutenant of the King's Own,
"that there wou'd have been a riot, which if there had wou'd in all
probability have proved fatal to Hancock, Adams, Warren, and the rest of
those Villains, as they were all up in the Pulpit together, and the
meeting was crowded with Officers and Seamen in such a manner that they
cou'd not have escaped; however it luckily did not turn out so; it wou'd
indeed have been a pity for them to have made their exit in that way, as
I hope before long we shall have the pleasure of seeing them do it by
the hands of the Hangman."

John Andrews looked at the matter differently. "The officers in general
behave more like a parcel of children, of late, than men. Captain ----
of the Royal Irish first exposed himself by behaving in a very
scandalous manner at the South meeting.... He got pretty decently
frighted for it. A woman, among the rest, attacked him and threatened to
wring his nose." An outbreak may have been what the officers wanted.
"But," says Samuel Adams, who acted on his maxim that it is good
politics to put and keep the enemy in the wrong, "order was restored,
and we proceeded regularly, and finished the business. I am persuaded,
were it not for the danger of precipitating a crisis, not a man of them
would have been spared."[54]

The whole was a type of the existing situation. Here were the officers,
still causing petty disturbances; here too, no doubt, were Tories,
contemptuous of the proceedings. Deeper still appears the real
significance of the occasion. On the one side was the governor, unable,
with all the power of the king, to prevent a meeting of the citizens to
condemn his presence in the town--for the meeting was the "Port Bill
meeting," adjourned from time to time since the previous May. And on the
other side were the citizens, legally protesting and exasperatingly
defiant, evidently under perfect self-restraint, determined not to
strike the first blow.

The officers took, as usual, a puerile revenge in the form of a
burlesque. "A vast number" of them assembled at the Coffee House in King
Street, and chose selectmen and an orator, "who deliver'd an oration
from the balcony to a crowd of few else beside gaping officers."[55]
Others of them caught a countryman who had been decoyed into buying a
musket from a soldier, and tarred and feathered him.

But t