The rude muster at Boston expanded into a motley yeoman army of sixteen thousand men within the first week of its sudden rally, and settled in its place to watch the town until the general Congress of the colonies at Philadelphia should give it countenance, and a commander. On the day the Congress met (May 10, 1775), Ethan Allen walked into the unguarded gates of the fort at Ticonderoga, at the head of a little force out of Vermont, and took possession of the stout place “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” though he held a commission from neither; and two days later Crown Point, near by, was taken possession of in the same manner. When the Congress met it found itself no longer a mere “Congress of Committees,” assembled for conference and protest. Its appeals for better government, uttered the last autumn, its arguments for colonial privilege, its protestations of loyalty and its prayers for redress, had been, one and all, not so much rejected as put by with contempt by the King and his ministers; and the mere movement of affairs was hurrying the colonies which it represented into measures which would presently put the whole matter of its controversy with the government at home beyond the stage of debate. Its uneasy members did not neglect to state their rights again, in papers whose moderation and temper of peace no candid man could overlook or deny; but they prepared for action also quite as carefully, like practical men who did not deceive themselves even in the midst of hope. [Illustration: RUINS OF FORT TICONDEROGA] Colonel Washington had come to the Congress in his provincial uniform; and, if no one cared to ask a man with whom it was so obviously difficult to be familiar why he wore such a habit there, all were free to draw their own conclusions. It was, no doubt, his instinctive expression of personal feeling in the midst of all that was happening; and his service in the Congress was from first to last that of a soldier. Its committees consulted him almost every day upon some question of military preparation: the protection of the frontier against the Indians, the organization of a continental force, the management of a commissariat, the gathering of munitions, proper means of equipment, feasible plans of fortification. While they deliberated, his own colony passed openly into rebellion. The 1st of June saw Virginia’s last House of Burgesses assemble. By the 8th of the month Dunmore had fled his capital, rather than see a second time the anger of a Williamsburg mob, and was a fugitive upon one of his Majesty’s armed vessels lying in the river. The colony had thenceforth no government save such as it gave itself; and its delegates at Philadelphia knew that there was for them no turning back. [Illustration: WATCHING THE FIGHT AT BUNKER HILL]