the fading page hangs against its pillar in the library of the State Department at Washington. They are the original replies sent by the Massachusetts towns to Samuel Adams's committee sitting in Faneuil Hall, during those first months of 1773. One may well read them with bated breath, for it is the touch of the elbow as the stout little democracies dress up into line, just before they plunge into actual fight at Concord and Bunker Hill. There is sometimes a noble scorn of the restraints of orthography, as of the despotism of Great Britain, in the work of the old town clerks, for they generally were secretaries of the committees; and once in a while a touch of Dogberry's quaintness, as the punctilious officials, though not always 'putting God first,' yet take pains that there shall be no mistake as to their piety by making every letter in the name of the Deity a rounded capital. Yet the documents ought to inspire the deepest reverence. They constitute the highest mark the town-meeting has ever touched. Never before and never since have Anglo-Saxon men, in lawful folk-mote assembled, given utterance to thoughts and feelings so fine in themselves and so pregnant with great events. To each letter stand affixed the names of the committee in autograph. This awkward scrawl was made by the rough fist of a Cape Ann fisherman, on shore for the day to do at town-meeting the duty his fellows had laid upon him: the hand that wrote this other was cramped from the scythe-handle, as its possessor mowed an intervale on the Connecticut; this blotted signature, where smutted fingers have left a black stain, was written by a blacksmith of Middlesex, turning aside a moment from forging a barrel that was to do duty at Lexington. They were men of the plainest; but as the documents containing statements of the most generous principles find the most courageous determination, were read in the town-houses, the committees who produced them, and the constituents for whom the committees stood, were lifted above the ordinary level. Their horizon expanded to the broadest; they had in view not simply themselves, but the welfare of the continent; not solely their own generation, but remote posterity. It was Samuel Adams's own plan, the consequences of which no one foresaw, neither friend nor foe. Even Hutchinson, who was scarcely less keen than Samuel Adams himself, was completely at fault. 'Such a foolish scheme,' he called it, 'that the faction must necessarily make themselves ridiculous.' But in January the eyes of men were opening. One of the ablest of the Tories, Daniel Leonard, wrote:—'This is the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition. I saw the small seed when it was implanted; it was a grain of mustard. I have watched the plant