CHAPTER XXII.

THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON:

WITH PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MEN ENGAGED IN IT.

HAVING from my earliest childhood, and in my native place, heard the story of the opening scenes of the Revolution from the lips of several who took part in it, and known, more or less, many others of them, I am unwilling that their share in it should be lost to the annals of that day. To Lexington and Concord belongs the honor of these opening scenes. In all contemporaneous history Lexington stands as the place where the first resistance was made to the King's troops, and Concord as the place where they met their first repulse and began their retreat. Lexington, by her band of protomartyrs, led the determined train that finally threw off the British yoke. "Too few to resist, too brave to flee," their blood was the seed of that great freedom-harvest gathered by those who came after them. Their service was little, of necessity, in a military point of view, but in a national and political aspect its importance was inestimable.

The motives of the Colonists from the beginning, were high and pure. Their pacific spirit was seen up to the last critical and decisive hour, and the sight of an invading force. Nothing was done at that moment except on the defensive. In view of the threatening condition of the country a military company had been formed in Lexington under Captain John Parker. It had one hundred and thirty names on its roll. My paternal grandfather, who was a member of this company, and whose name stands also on the roll of five-months' men at Ticonderoga in 1776, and that of the three-months' campaign at Cambridge in 1778, was apprehensive of an approaching conflict. He had seen a few men riding on horseback past his house at dusk on the evening of the 18th, and as, looking beyond the waving grass of that premature season, he saw the wind blow their overcoats open, he noticed their uniforms and swords underneath. This aroused the suspicions of the people, and he, with another man, was sent early the next morning to get intelligence of any movement below by the British troops. He stopped in Arlington, then Menotomy, at a tavern called the Black Horse, kept by a Mr. Wetherby, where the two Provincial committees, of Safety and Supplies, usually met. While there, the enemy arrived, and my grandfather narrowly escaped being made a prisoner. He found his horse let loose and injured, though not disabled. At a later hour in the day Mr. Samuel Whittemore of Menotomy, then eighty years of age, who

married, as his second wife, my great-grandmother, was shot, bayoneted, and left for dead; but he was afterward taken to the above tavern, and finally recovered and lived to the age of ninety-six.

My grandmother, when the British troops eight hundred grenadiers and light-infantry, under Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Smith of the Tenth British Regiment, and Major John Pitcairn of the marines had passed her house, in the centre of Lexington, on their way to Concord, left the house, taking her two children (my father, who was nine years old that day, and his brother, a boy of four) to spend the dread day with a neighbor and friend. A foot-weary soldier had fallen behind the column, and as the sun was rising he met and saluted my grandmother: "Good-morning, madam; the King's troops are paying you an early visit this morning." Her reply, in the custom of those days, was from Scripture, in the language of the elders of the town of Bethlehem, who met Samuel, and "trembled at his coming." She said, "Come ye peaceably?" The soldier could not reply as the Prophet did, "Peaceably!" but said with little of her reverence, "Ah, madam! you have carried the joke rather too far with his Majesty."

When the troops returned from Concord they entered my grandfather's house, broke a large mirror, -a part of the frame of which was long kept in the family, and is now in Lexington Memorial Hall, — and demolished the beaufet, with its contents of valuable crockery, some of which