[For information incorporated in the notes the Editor is indebted to many of the authors represented in the volume. He has also, in several instances, received valuable suggestions from Mr. Francis F. Browne’s “Bugle Echoes.” The notes are intended to be suggestive rather than in any sense exhaustive.] In Time of Strife 1. PAUL REVERE’S RIDE. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most widely read and most beloved American poet, was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had long resided, March 24, 1882. Paul Revere, who was a self-taught engraver upon copperplate, and who at the time of the Revolution was one of the four engravers in America, rendered his first important service as a messenger in connection with the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston harbor. Before he took his most famous ride he had traveled several thousand miles in the interest of the “patriot” cause, and after “the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five,” continued to act as a bearer of dispatches. He was one of the committee of upwards of thirty formed in Boston to watch the movements of the British soldiers. On the memorable evening of April 18th, troops were observed marching toward the bottom of the Common. About ten o’clock Revere was apprised of this fact, whereupon he at once repaired to the house of Dr. Joseph Warren (afterward General Warren), one of the committee. There he discovered that an “express,” one William Dawes, had already been sent by land to Lexington. Hurriedly seeking his friend, Robert Newman, the sexton of the “Old North Church” (Christ Church, Salem Street), and arranging for the display of the signal previously agreed upon, Revere set out. He succeeded in reaching Lexington before Dawes, who joined him about half an hour after his arrival. The two, together with Dr. Prescott, “a high Son of Liberty,” started in company for Concord, but were intercepted at Lincoln by a party of British. Revere and Dawes were captured, but Prescott managed to escape by jumping his horse over a stone wall. It was he who rode on to Concord, alarming the countryside as he went. Of Dawes’s part in the enterprise of the night, Helen F. More wrote thus humorously in the _Century Magazine_ for February, 1896: WHAT’S IN A NAME? I am a wandering, bitter shade; Never of me was a hero made; Poets have never sung my praise, Nobody crowned my brows with bays; And if you ask me the fatal cause, I answer only, “My name was Dawes.” ’Tis all very well for children to hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere; But why should my name be quite forgot, Who rode so boldly and well, God wot? Why should I ask? The reason is clear-- My name is Dawes and his Revere.