These words were written many years later: to quote them here is to take a long glance ahead. When Dr. Stevenson came to Baltimore, the clouds of war were lowering over the colonies. Governor Sharpe of Maryland exerted himself to the utmost to co-operate with General Braddock in the conquest of the Ohio for England, but fell out with the Lower House of the Provincial Assembly. The war was never popular in Maryland, although large sums were finally appropriated for the defence of the Province. When the news of Braddock’s defeat reached Baltimore, the alarm was intense. Tradition relates that upon one occasion such terrifying reports of the proximity of the Indian allies of France were brought to Baltimore that the women and children were put aboard ships, while the masculine portion of the inhabitants prepared to withstand the attack of the savages. But the attack never came; instead, many settlers in Western Maryland and Western Pennsylvania hurried back to the East, impressed with the necessity of closer settlement for defensive purposes. This powerful incentive to unity was one that had never been felt by the early colonists of Maryland, who, unlike their brethren in the North, for the most part dwelt in peace with the natives. During the war, several companies of royal troops were quartered in Baltimore. Among the officers in command, Captain Samuel Gardner, of his Majesty’s Forty-seventh Regiment, was engaged in recruiting for his Majesty’s service. His recruiting sergeant displayed such great zeal in the pursuit of his duty that strenuous opposition was aroused among the gentry of Baltimore, who found their indentured servants disappearing one day, to appear the next in his Majesty’s uniform. Upon one occasion, Mr. Charles Ridgely and others rescued--or recaptured--six recruits, claiming that they were indentured servants, which proved, Captain Gardner said, “not to be the truth _as to all of them_.” The irate Captain appealed to the civil authorities, with a long story about a conspiracy of “some of the better sort at the Church in the Forest [St. Thomas’s]--to raise a body of about two hundred men, and take all my Recruits from me.” The plan of the conspirators, if such existed, never materialized, but Captain Gardner received cold comfort from Mr. Bordley, the Attorney-General. “He put a case,” laments Captain Gardner to Governor Sharpe, “not very much to the Honour of the Recruiting Service--_Suppose a man steals a horse, etc._”