From the solitude of the ocean to the seething turmoil which Franklin found in the colonies must have been a startling transition. He had come home an old man, lacking but little of the allotted threescore years and ten. He had earned and desired repose, but never before had he encountered such exacting, important, and unremitting labor as immediately fell to his lot. Lexington and Concord fights had taken place a fortnight before he landed, and the news preceded him in Philadelphia by a few days only. Many feelings may be discerned in the brief note which he wrote on May 16 to Dr. Priestley:-- "DEAR FRIEND,--You will have heard, before this reaches you, of a march stolen by the regulars into the country by night, and of their _expedition_ back again. They retreated twenty miles in six hours. The governor had called the Assembly to propose Lord North's pacific plan, but before the time of their meeting began the cutting of throats. You know it was said he carried the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other, and it seems he chose to give them a taste of the sword first." To another correspondent he said that "the feeble Americans, who pelted them all the way, could scarcely keep up with" the rapidly retreating redcoats. But the occurrence of bloodshed had an immense meaning for Franklin; it opened to his vision all the future: an irreconcilable struggle, and finally independence, with a bitter animosity long surviving. He could not address all those who had once been near and dear to him in England as he did the good Dr. Priestley. The letter to Strahan of July 5, 1775, is famous:-- "MR STRAHAN,--You are a member of Parliament, and one of that majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns and murder our people. Look upon your hands; they are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy, and I am, "Yours, B. FRANKLIN." But strained as his relations with Strahan were for a while, it is agreeable to know that the estrangement between such old and close friends was not everlasting. To write at length concerning Franklin's services during his brief stay at home would involve giving a history of the whole affairs of the colonies at this time. But space presses, and this ground is familiar and has been traversed in other volumes in this series. It seems sufficient, therefore, rather to enumerate than to narrate his various engagements, and thus to reserve more room for less well-known matters.