ines,
of Sudbury, eighty years old, who marched with his company to South
Bridge, at Concord, then joined in that hot pursuit to Lexington, and
fell as gloriously as Warren at Bunker Hill. He was James Hayward, of
Acton, twenty-two years old, foremost in that deadly race from
Charlestown to Concord, who raised his piece at the same moment with a
British soldier, each exclaiming, "You are a dead man!" The Briton
dropped, shot through the heart. Hayward fell mortally wounded.
"Father," said he, "I started with forty balls; I have three left. I
never did such a day's work before. Tell mother not to mourn too much;
and tell her whom I love more than my mother that I am not sorry I
turned out."

The last living link with the Revolution has long been broken; and we
who stand here to-day have a sympathy with the men at the old North
Bridge, which those who preceded us here at earlier celebrations could
not know. With them war was a name and a tradition. When they assembled
to celebrate this day, they saw a little group of tottering forms, whose
pride was that, before living memory, they had been minute men of
American Independence.

But with us, how changed! War is no longer a tradition, half romantic
and obscure. It has ravaged how many of our homes, it has wrung how many
of the hearts before me? North and South, we know the pang. We do not
count around us a few feeble veterans of the contest, but we are girt
with a cloud of witnesses. Behold them here to-day, sharing in these
pious and peaceful rites, the honored citizens whose glory it is that
they were minute men of American liberty and union! These men of to-day
interpret to us, with resistless eloquence, the men and the times we
commemorate. Now, if never before, we understand the Revolution. Now, we
know the secrets of those old hearts and homes.

No royal governor sits in yon stately capitol; no hostile fleet for many
a year has vexed the waters of our coast; nor is any army but our own
ever likely to tread our soil. Not such are our enemies to-day. They do
not come proudly stepping to the drum-beat, with bayonets flashing in
the morning sun. But wherever party spirit shall strain the ancient
guarantees of freedom, or bigotry and ignorance of caste shall strike at
equal rights, or corruption shall poison the very springs of national
life, there, minute men of liberty, are your Lexington Green and Concord
Bridge! And, as you love your country and your kind, and would