Boston; and when one of their Tory parsons had intimated that clowns should not meddle with politics, they had been as fiery as they could have been in Massachusetts.[339] Gordon, of Jamaica Plain, in appending notes to a sermon which he had just preached on the Provincial Thanksgiving of December 15, 1774, refers to the brave lead of Virginia in the present time, as nine years before she had been foremost in the stamp-act time.[340] Governor Dunmore was reporting to Dartmouth (December, 1774) that every county in Virginia was arming a company of men, to be ready as occasion required. John Adams, at Philadelphia, read to Patrick Henry from a paper of Joseph Hawley, that the result of the action of the ministry rendered it necessary to fight. "I am of that man's opinion", replied the ardent Virginian.[341] With the new year (1775) that opinion was becoming widespread. _Ames' Almanac_ (1775), published in Boston, was printing, for almost every family in New England to read, "a method for making gunpowder", so that every person "may easily supply himself with a sufficiency of that commodity." Day by day news came to Boston from every direction of the indorsement of Congress, and of the wild-fire speed of the dispersion of the military spirit. Those who remembered the 40,000 men who marched towards Boston at the time of the D'Anville scare, thirty years before, said the enthusiasm then was nothing like the present. Somehow Gage began to feel more confident. He had in January 3,500 men in his Boston garrison, and almost as many more were expected, and he did not hesitate to send (January 23) Captain Balfour and a hundred men, with two cannon, to Marshfield, to protect the two hundred loyalists there, who had signed the articles by which Timothy Ruggles was hoping to band the friends of government together, and the reports which Balfour sent back seemed to satisfy the governor that the measure was effective.[342]