Now he patted his horse's side,
Now gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!"

From the narrative of Paul Revere in the archives of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, we learn that the signals were seen
before he reached the Charlestown shore:--

"When I got into town, I met Colonel Conant and several others; they
said they had seen our signals; I told them what was acting, and I
went to get me a horse; I got a horse of Deacon Larkin. While the
horse was preparing, Richard Devens, Esq., who was one of the
Committee of Safety, came to me and told me that he came down the road
from Lexington after sundown, that evening; that he met ten British
officers, all well mounted and armed, going up the road."]

Robert Newman, sexton, had gone to bed. The officers of one of the
king's regiments, occupying the front chamber, saw him retire, but did
not see him a minute later crawl out of a window to the roof of a
shed, drop lightly to the ground, make his way to the church, enter,
turn the key, lock the door, climb the stairs to the tower, and hang
the lanterns in the loft above the bell. It was but the work of a
moment. Having done it, he hastened down the stairway, past the organ,
to the floor of the church. The full moon was flooding the arches
above him with its mellow light; but he did not tarry to behold the
beauty of the scene; not that he feared ghosts would rise from the
coffins in the crypt beneath the church,--he was not afraid of dead
men,--but he would rather the redcoats should not know what he had
been doing. He raised a window, dropped from it to the ground, ran
down an alley, reached his house, climbed the shed, and was in bed
when officers of one of the regiments came to make inquiry about the
lanterns. Of course, Robert, being in bed, could not have hung them
there. It must have been done by somebody else.[55]

[Footnote 55: Paul Revere in his narrative says "a friend" made the
signals. It has been claimed t