There is no doubt that the “Sons of Liberty,” a popular association of Americans, were connected with this movement; for one of the first acts of its members was to send, through this office, threatening letters to the leading members of the tory party. This association took the lead in political matters, and exercised a powerful influence over the masses. They also, in the dead hour of the night, went to Holt’s printing-office and printed inflammatory handbills themselves, and then circulated them throughout the city. _JOHN HOLT._ This gentleman was originally mayor of Williamsburg, Virginia. He also established a newspaper there, and rendered important service to the cause of the patriots. He came to New York, where ten years before he had published the “New York Gazette and Post-Boy” in company with James Parker. He started another paper shortly after his arrival in New York. When the British took possession of the city, he left it, and published his journal at Esopus and Poughkeepsie. While at the former place he published Burgoyne’s pompous proclamation, also the full account of the dreadful massacre in the Wyoming Valley. Holt died January 30, 1784, aged sixty-four years. The tongue of slander found no poison in his life to bait shafts with; and justice, having awarded him all praise in life, left his memory and his acts to the historian. VIII. Pennsylvania—The Olden Time. _SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF PENNSYLVANIA._ William Penn, the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, was born in London in the year 1644. His father, Sir William Penn, was distinguished in the British navy as an able admiral, being commander of the fleet at the reduction of Jamaica in 1655, and contributing greatly to the defeat of the Dutch fleet in 1664. For his services he was knighted by Charles II. William Penn was entered in 1660, as a gentleman commoner, at Christ’s Church, Oxford; but, withdrawing from the national forms of worship, in connection with other students, who like himself had attended the preaching of Thomas Loe, an eminent member of the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, he was punished by fine for nonconformity, and in the succeeding year, for pertinacious adherence to his opinions, was expelled from the college. His father, considering that his singularly sober and serious manner of life tended to prevent his elevation to the honors of Charles’s licentious court, was indignant at his disgrace, and therefore turned him out of doors in 1662, after, as he says, being whipped and beaten.