ht. The dead and dying were carried
through the streets pale and ghastly and covered with blood. She said
the people witnessed the battle from the houses in Boston, and as
regiment after regiment was swept down by the terrible fire of the
Americans, they said that the British were feigning to be frightened and
falling down for sport; but when they saw that they did not get up
again, and when the dead and wounded were brought back to Boston, the
reality began to be made known, and that little frolic of taking the
fort was really an ugly job, and hard to accomplish.

Mrs. Ansart died in Dracut at the age of eighty-six years, January 27,
1849. She retained her mental and physical faculties to a great degree
till within a short time before her death. She was accustomed to walk to
church, a distance of one mile, when she was eighty years of age.
Colonel and Mrs. Ansart were both buried in Woodbine Cemetery, in the
part of Lowell which belonged to Dracut at the time of their interment.

* * * * *

BEACON HILL BEFORE THE HOUSES.

BY DAVID M. BALFOUR.

The visitor to the dome of the Capitol of the State, as he looks out
from its lantern and beholds spread immediately beneath his feet a
semi-circular space, whose radius does not exceed a quarter of a mile,
covered with upward of two thousand dwelling-houses, churches, hotels,
and other public edifices, does not in all probability ask himself the
question: "_What did this place look like before there was any house
here?_" When Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington visited Boston in
1756, on business connected with the French war, and lodged at the
Cromwell's Head Tavern, a building which is still standing on the north
side of School Street, upon the site of No. 13, where Mrs. Harrington
now deals out coffee and "mince"-pie to her customers, Beacon Hill was a
collection of pastures, owned by thirteen proprietors, in lots
containing from a half to twenty acres each. The southwesterly slope of
the prominence is designated upon the old maps as "Copley Hill."

We will now endeavor to describe the appearance of the hill, at the
commencement of the American Revolution, with the beacon on its top,
from which it took its name, consisting of a tall mast sixty feet in
height, erected in 1635, with an iron crane projecting from its side,
supporting an iron pot. The mast was placed on cross-timbers, with a
stone foundation, supported by braces, and provid