Then, almost immediately, came the clash of arms. General Gage would not sit still and see the country round about him made ready for armed resistance without at least an effort to keep control of it. On the 19th of April he despatched eight hundred men to seize the military stores which the provincials had gathered at Concord, and there followed an instant rising of the country. Riders had sped through the country-side during the long night which preceded the movement of the troops, to give warning; and before the troops could finish their errand armed men beset them at almost every turn of the road, swarming by companies out of every hamlet and firing upon them from hedge and fence corner and village street as if they were outlaws running the gauntlet. The untrained villagers could not stand against them in the open road or upon the village greens, where at first they mustered, but they could make every way-side covert a sort of ambush, every narrow bridge a trap in which to catch them at a disadvantage. Their return to Boston quickened to a veritable rout, and they left close upon three hundred of their comrades, dead, wounded, or prisoners, behind them ere they reached the cover of their lines again. The news of their march and of the attack upon them had spread everywhere, and in every quarter the roads filled with the provincial minute men marching upon Boston. Those who had fired upon the troops and driven them within their lines did not go home again; those who came too late for the fighting stayed to see that there were no more sallies from the town; and the morning of the 20th disclosed a small army set down by the town in a sort of siege. [Illustration: NOTICE TO MILITIA] [Illustration: AN ACCOUNT OF THE CONCORD FIGHT] That same night of the 20th Lord Dunmore, in Virginia, landed a force of marines from an armed sloop in the river and seized the gunpowder stored at Williamsburg. There, too, the country rose,—under Mr. Henry himself as captain. They did not reach the scene soon enough to meet the marines,—there were no thick-set villages in that country-side to pour their armed men into the roads at a moment’s summons,—but they forced the earl, their governor, to pay for the powder he had ordered seized and taken off. [Illustration: SIGNATURE OF ETHAN ALLEN]