On the 14th of September she describes the excitement in Boston, the Governor mounting cannon on Beacon Hill, digging intrenchments on the Neck, planting guns, throwing up breastworks, encamping a regiment. In consequence of the powder being taken from Charlestown, she goes on to say, a general alarm spread through all the towns and was soon caught in Braintree. And then she describes one of the most extraordinary scenes in history. About eight o'clock on Sunday evening, she writes to her husband, at least two hundred men, preceded by a horse-cart, passed by her door in dead silence, and marched down to the powder-house, whence they took out the town's powder, because they dared not trust it where there were so many Tories, carried it into the other parish, and there secreted it. On their way they captured a notorious "King's man," and found on him two warrants aimed at the Commonwealth. When their patriotic trust was discharged, they turned their attention to the trembling Briton. Profoundly excited and indignant though they were, they never thought of mob violence, but, true to the inherited instincts of their race, they resolved themselves into a public meeting! The hostile warrants being produced and exhibited, it was put to a vote whether they should be burned or preserved. The majority voted for burning them. Then the two hundred gathered in a circle round the single lantern, and maintained a rigid silence while the offending papers were consumed. That done--the blazing eyes in that grim circle of patriots watching the blazing writs--"they called a vote whether they should huzza; but, it being Sunday evening, it passed in the negative!" Only in the New England of John Winthrop and the Mathers, of John Quincy and the Adamses, would such a scene have been possible: a land of self-conquest and self-control, of a deep love of the public welfare and a willingness to take trouble for a public object. A little later Mrs. Adams writes her husband that there has been a conspiracy among the negroes, though it has been kept quiet, "I wish most sincerely," she adds, "that there was not a slave in the province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me--to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have."