She had her politics, too, as well as her religious convictions, though there are only slight indications in the diary of the storm that was to burst so soon, and of which Boston was to be the centre. She speaks incidentally of the famous “Boston Massacre” (1770), when the British troops sent to Boston to enforce the Townshend Acts fired at and killed several unarmed citizens (and, as Daniel Webster said, the Revolution began,) as the “murder of the 5th March last.” She had an account of the first anniversary celebrations of the Boston Massacre, “yesterday’s publick performances and exhibitions” ready to send to her “hond. Mamma,” “but Aunt says I need not write about ’em because no doubt there will be printed accounts.” She could have wished to be there herself, but could not, her face being swollen with a heavy cold. She knew James Lovell, the famous Boston patriot, who delivered the Anniversary Address. “Master Jimmy Lovell,” she calls him in another place. _A propos_ of a “very beautiful white feather hat,” for the purchase of which she had long been saving up “papa’s kind allowance,” we learn she is, “as we say, a daughter of liberty. I chose to wear as much of our own manufactory as possible.” In which respect she is very much in the “fation,” as she dearly loves to be. “Daughters of liberty,” we read elsewhere, “held spinning and weaving bees, and gathered in bands pledging themselves to drink no tea till the obnoxious Revenue Act was repealed.” Young unmarried girls joined in an association with the proud declaration, “We, the daughters of those Patriots who have appeared for the public interest, do now with pleasure engage with them in denying ourselves the drinking of foreign tea.” When she went “a-visiting to Colonel Gridley’s with Aunt, and had danced with Miss Polly Deming to the ‘musick of the minuet’ sung by Miss Becky Gridley, the Colonel brought in the talk of Whigs and Tories, and taught me the difference between them.” But in reality one suspects she understood even less of Col. Gridley’s political lecture than of Mr. Beacon’s sermon—and led her quiet life from day to day without the slightest suspicion of the great events whose shadows were thus cast before. She got through her day’s work—whether it were “spinning 30 knots of linning yarn (partly), new-footing a pair of stockings for Lucinda, reading a part of the pilgrim’s progress, coppieing part of my text journal,” or, as on the 9th March, a “piece-meal” day’s work, when she “sew’d on the bosom of unkle’s shirt, mended two pair of gloves, mended for the wash two handkerchiefs (one cambrick), sewed on half a border of a lawn apron of aunt’s, read part of the xxist chapter of Exodus, and a story in the ‘Mother’s Gift,’” without suspecting that anything more exciting was in store for her than the “constitations” of which she has given us such a graphic picture.