276

PROVINCE HOUSE 281

WHERE WASHINGTON ASSUMED COMMAND 308

PLANNING THE ESCAPE 324

WASHINGTON'S HEADQUARTERS 334

THE DINNER-PARTY 381

HOME OF THE EXILES 384

DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION.

I.

ROBERT WALDEN GOES TO MARKET.

Joshua Walden, of Rumford, Province of New Hampshire, was receiving
letters from Samuel Adams and Doctor Joseph Warren in relation to the
course pursued by King George III. and his ministers in collecting
revenue from the Colonies. Mr. Walden had fought the French and
Indians at Ticonderoga and Crown Point in the war with France. The gun
and powder-horn which he carried under Captain John Stark were hanging
over the door in his kitchen. His farm was on the banks of the
Merrimac. The stately forest trees had fallen beneath the sturdy blows
of his axe, and the sun was shining on intervale and upland, meadow
and pasture which he had cleared. His neighbors said he was getting
forehanded. Several times during the year he made a journey to Boston
with his cheeses, beef, pigs, turkeys, geese, chickens, a barrel
of apple-sauce, bags filled with wool, together with webs of
linsey-woolsey spun and woven by his wife and daughter. He never
failed to have a talk with Mr. Adams and Doctor Warren, John Hancock,
and others foremost in resisting the aggressions of the mother
country upon the rights and liberties of the Colonies. When at home he
was up early in the morning, building the fire, feeding the cattle,
and milking the cows. Mrs. Walden, the while, was stirring the corn
meal for a johnny-cake, putting the potatoes in the ashes, placing the
Dutch oven on the coals, hanging the pots and kettles on the hooks and
trammels.

Robert, their only son, twenty years old, would be glad to take
another nap after being called by his father, but felt it would not be
manly for one who had mowed all the hired men out of their swaths in
the hayfield, and who had put the best wrestler in Rumford on his
back, to lie in bed and let his father do all the chores, with the
cows lowing to get to the pasture. With a spring he was on his feet
and slipping on his clothes. He was soon on his way to the barn,
drumming on the tin pail and whistling as he walked to the milking.

The cows turned into pasture, he rubbed down th