and then, marching up Brattle Street to the house of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, Thomas Oliver--the house that was afterwards the home in succession of Elbridge Gerry, Rev. Charles Lowell and his son James Russell Lowell--they extorted from him, too, a pledge to resign. “My house in Cambridge,” he wrote, “being surrounded by about four thousand men, I sign my name--Thomas Oliver.” Both the first and second of the Provincial Congresses met in Cambridge, and at last the running battle of April 19, 1775, swept through the borders of the town. Twenty-six Americans were killed within the boundaries of Cambridge, six of them citizens of the place, and the American militia who followed the British retreat from Concord on that momentous evening lay on their arms at last on Cambridge Common. For eleven months after the Concord fight, Cambridge was a fortified camp. The college buildings, the Episcopal church and the larger houses were occupied as barracks. General Ward established his headquarters in the gambrel-roofed house which was afterwards the birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes. On the lawn before the house, in the hush of the June evening, Prescott’s men were drawn up, while President Langdon of the college, in cap and gown, prayed for the success of their arms ere they marched to Bunker Hill. Two weeks later Washington reached the camp, and on July 3d, under the spreading elm at the western end of the Common, unsheathed his sword and, as the inscription reads, “took command of the American Army.” Washington lived [Illustration: WASHINGTON ELM.] for a while in the president’s house, but soon made his headquarters in the fine old mansion of the Vassalls which was later the home of Longfellow. After March, 1776, when Boston was finally evacuated by the British, Cambridge ceased to be involved in the military events of the Revolution, but in 1777 the captured troops of Burgoyne were quartered in the town, the soldiers swinging their hammocks in the college buildings and the officers occupying the deserted mansions of “Tory Row.” Burgoyne lived in the house sometimes called, in derision of its first clerical occupant, “The Bishop’s Palace,” and Riedesel and his accomplished wife in the Lechmere house. “Never have I chanced,” wrote Madame Riedesel, “upon such a charming situation,” and never has our colonial life been more charmingly described than by this brave and vivacious German lady in the letters written from her pleasant prison to her distant home. For fifty years after the Revolutionary epoch, Cambridge was a country town of quiet habits, its only distinguishing characteristic being the scholastic and literary atmosphere that hung about the college. It was a good [Illustration: J. R. Lowell.]