caught down from above the broad chimney-piece where it had hung for years as heirloom or trophy, a motley array, lacking in discipline, over-generous of advice to their superiors - neighbors, comrades and brothers all, they had swarmed to the ragged. fences that flanked the king's highway between Concord and Boston; they had camped in most unmilitary style on hillside or in field, fallen behind the hastily-tossed earthworks on Bunker Hill or died beneath the blossoming apple-trees beside the flowing Mystic.

And the officers about whom these earlier fighters rallied were a scarcely less motley group than were the men who but haltingly acknowledged their authority. Here in the first fights for freedom, within the straggling camps or meeting in that first council of war at the foot of pleasant Prospect Hill came the waverer, the blusterer, the man of moderate experience, the would-be martinet, the newly-elected captain, ignorant of tactics and uncertain as to the proper use of his sword— food for merriment and contempt among the trained warriors of the English king, but patriotic none the less, formidable because sheathed in the justice of their cause.

"Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just;

And he but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted"—

Surely never did those noble words which the great poet puts into the mouth of an English king find fitter application than toward these patriot leaders in the new England across the seas, where once again the old issue between tyranny and personal freedom was to be fought to the end.

Here, to the leadership at the camp on Prospect Hill, came Heath the only colonel or, at least, the first of the colonels;

here, too, came Artemas Ward, "commander-in-chief" by sufferance; Prescott of Pepperell, the valiant veteran of the Canadian campaign; Putnam, the modern Cincinnatus, who literally turned from the plough to the battle-field; Warren the Roxbury doctor and busy committee-man, who fought as a volunteer and fell in the rush from the captured earthworks, the noblest victim of the stand on Bunker Hill; Knowlton the brave Connecticut leader; Gridley the cannonier who had trained the guns on Louisburg; Stark the doughty Indian fighter from the New Hampshire Grants and Reed the equally intrepid son of those granite hills; Brooks, the Medford major; Thomas the Kingston doctor; Spencer of Connecticut; Greene of Rhode Island-men whose names are indissolubly linked to those opening days of revolution and whose memories should linger with their countrymen as of those who by their courage, their endurance and their sturdy patriotism fired and cemented the stock from which was to spring the real American soldier.

"Will he fight?" asked General Gage, as, in the battery on Copp's Hill the tory lawyer who stood by the General's side. pointed out the stalwart figure of his rebel brother-in-law, rallying the farmers behind the rudely-lined breastworks on Bunker Hill.

"Fight!" was the reply, "yes, yes; you may depend on him to do that to the very last drop of blood in his veins."

A notable figure in those stirring days was this same rebel brother-in-law Colonel William Prescott. A type of the American fighters for freedom, his statue to-day fitly crowns the height which he so valiantly defended and seems to guard the tall gray shaft that commemorates for us that eventful seventeenth of June. Fifty years of age, a splendid figure, handsome

of face, full of energy and of inspiring words, he wore that hot June day in the trenches a simple uniform — the blue coat, lapped and faced and adorned with a single row of buttons; the knee breeches and silver-buckled shoes, and the inevitable three-cornered hat, while his directing hand grasped the unsheathed sword whose temper had already been proven in battle for that English king who was now no longer his master.

Of a like type and of equal valor were the men who commanded and the men who followed, the men who fought and those who fell in the opening battles of the war.

It was these fighters from the New England farms and their brethren from the plantations of the further South-frank, fearless, illy-disciplined, determined and alert, who gathered on the commons of Cambridge and, merging themselves into the Continental Army, accepted George Washington of Virginia. as their commander and generalissimo.

Such then, when he took command at Cambridge, were the troops of Washington. “A hardy militia, brave and patriotic, but illy-armed, undisciplined, unorganized and wanting in almost everything necessary for successful war."

What could he make of them?

Full justice can never be done to the ability of the first American General. Hampered and harassed by the uncertainty of his forces, by the lack of proper munitions of war, by the half-hearted measures of a hesitating Congress and even by the wavering desires of the people whose interests he was to defend, he was yet able, with all the hazards against him, to drive a disciplined British Army from Boston and to hold against gathering odds the important city of New York. Defeated at Brooklyn by a force of British regulars outnumbering him three to one, he saved his army by one of the most mas