y lines just as General
Ward was ready to put his arms about Boston's Neck. The lad took his
place with the five hundred men and walked by Ensign Richards' side,
as he proudly bore the standard up to the gates, which Ebenezer
Learned "unbarred and opened." Once within the lines, Jeremy,
unmindful of the crow's feet strewn over the way, made haste through
lane and street to his old home on Beacon Hill. "Could that be his
mother looking out at him through the window-pane?" he thought, as he
drew near.

She saw him. She knew him. But what could it mean that she did not
open the door to let him in; that she waved him away? It could not be
that she, his own mother, had turned Tory, that her face was grown so
red and angry at the sight of her son.

Jeremy banged away at the door. There was no answer.

At last he heard the lifting of a sash, a head, muffled carefully,
appeared from the highest window in the house, and a voice (the lad
knew whose it was) said: "Go, Jeremy! Go away out of Boston as fast as
you can. I'll come to you as soon as it is safe."

"Why, mother, what's the matter?" cried the boy.

"Small pox! I've had it. Everybody has it. Go!"

"Good-by," cried Jeremy, running out of Boston as fast as any British
soldier of them all and a good deal more frightened. He burst into
Aunt Hannah's house with the news that he had been to Boston, that the
soldiers were all gone, that he had seen his mother, that she had the
small-pox and sent him off in a hurry.

"Tut! tut!" she cried. "It's wicked to tell lies, Jeremy Jagger."

"I'm not telling lies. Every word is true. Please give me something to
eat."

But Aunt Hannah did not wait to give the lad food, nor even to speak
the prayer of thanksgiving that went like incense from her heart. She
went into the barn-yard and threw corn on the barn-floor, to which the
hens and turkeys made haste. Closing the door, she summoned Jeremy to
kill the largest and best of them.

That Sunday afternoon the brick oven glowed with fervent heat, the
white, fat offerings went in, and the golden-brown turkeys and
chickens came out; and as each, in turn, was pronounced "done," Aunt
Hannah repeated the words: "Hungry! hungry! hungry! Hungry all
winter!"

The big clothes-basket was full of lint for wounds that now never
should be made. Gladly she tossed out the fluffy mass, and packed
within it every dainty the house contained.

It was nearly sunset when Aunt Hannah and Jeremy started