e
to do so from lack of artillery and ammunition. This lack was to some
extent supplied by the capture of some ordnance ships by our gallant
privateers, though as late as January, 1776, one of the Provincial
colonels wrote to another: "The bay is open; everything thaws here
except Old Put. He is still as hard as ever, crying out for
_powder--powder_--ye gods, give us powder!"

Cannon-balls, several hundred of them, he had secured (if we may credit
a story told at the time) by conspicuously posting some of his men on an
elevation in front of a sandy hill in sight of a British war-ship, from
which by this ingenious ruse he drew a rain of shot, which supplied his
needs for the time being, as they were afterward easily dug out of the
sand!

Among the captures by the privateers was a 13-inch brass mortar weighing
nearly three thousand pounds, which was taken to Cambridge, where
(according to the same veracious narrator of the "powder cry," the witty
Provincial colonel), it was the occasion of a great jubilation. "To
crown the glorious scene," he says, "there intervened one truly
ludicrous, which was Old Put mounted on the large mortar, which was
fixed in its bed for the occasion, with a bottle of rum in his hand,
standing parson to christen, while godfather Mifflin, the
quartermaster-general, gave it the name of Congress!"

Old Put never lost a chance for fun and frolic, though he was as stern a
disciplinarian as Washington himself, who, however, must have been
greatly shocked at this horse-play in which his favorite General took
part. But the rank and file were delighted; and it was the possession of
just such qualities, of hilarious good-humor combined with sturdy
common-sense, that made Old Put a universal favorite. For dignity he
cared nothing at all; for discipline he was a "stickler"; and, as the
men hated the one as much as they disliked the other, yet loved and
admired their rough-and-ready General intensely, Putnam proved the
coherent factor in the combination that held the army together. At
another "truly ludicrous" scene, somewhat later, in which Putnam was one
of the participants, the dignified Commander-in-Chief is said to have
laughed until his sides ached. Looking from a window of his chamber in
the Craigie mansion, one morning, Washington perceived Putnam
approaching on horseback, with a very stout lady mounted behind his
saddle, and riding as if for dear life. The woman was an accessory of a
British spy,