leave the station, you can send Mrs. Ingham and the trunks to our house, and you and the children can start on foot.

For, in a sense, when you meet William at the Providence station, you are all standing where you might have been swimming when and where the battle of Lexington began. That was all water then, and you must impress it on the boys that near that spot the boats from King George's squadron met quietly to forward the regi ments detached for a surprise excursion on the evening of the 18th of April, 1775. You may as well take the boys with you. through Arlington Street to Beacon Street and then to the Union Boat Club House. Impress it on them, all the way, that this was all under water then, and that after dark, on that eventful April evening, rather more than a thousand soldiers were being rowed by the seamen of the fleet to East Cambridge-what they then called Phips's Farm. Go in from Beacon Street through a little street they call Otter Street, and

almost directly north, nearly parallel with the present land line, these thousand men were taken thus across the mouth of Charles River. The bridge to Cambridge—what Mr. Lowell calls one of our "caterpillar bridges' -crosses their line. But I think you can see a steeple and a chimney on the East Cambridge shore above that bridge.

Do not go any farther with them then, but take them back to the house, and as soon as their mother is ready, after breakfast, you can all start for Lexington and Concord, on the line on which Lord Percy followed the first detachment. The boys will know that he went the next day.

I

I do not know how you feel about money. It is well worth what a carriage will cost you. But if I had your legs and the boys', would do it all, with the help of the trolleys and the steam cars, for half a dollar apiece. Let that be as madam says.

Percy's brigade slept that night in their tents on the Common. And if you choose you can walk across on the broad path from

eyes

the Providence station to West Street over the very line of his little camp. With these I have seen the rings, in the green grass of the spring, which showed where his tents were. Colonel Smith had been sent out with his thousand men as a sort of surprise, by night. But he sent word back that the country was alarmed, and Percy was directed to take a large detachment to his relief. Percy was a fine young fellow, a spirited soldier, son of the Duke of Northumberland, whom he succeeded afterward in the dukedom. He was half-brother, by another mother, of that James Smithson who founded the Smithsonian Institution. Perhaps the name Smithson is now better known than that of Percy among English-speaking people; certainly James hoped it would be. Percy paraded his men early and marched them out from the Common to what we call Tremont Street, and there they were drawn up across the head of School Street, all ready to march, but that he had to wait for the detachment of marines from the fleet who were to join him.