We cannot leave the neighborhood without at least making mention of the Massacre of the 5th of March, 1770, which took place in front of the tavern. It was then a three-story brick house, the successor, it is believed, of the first building erected on the spot and destroyed in the great fire of 1711. On the opposite corner of the lane stood the Royal Custom House, where a sentry was walking his lonely round on that frosty night, little dreaming of the part he was to play in the coming tragedy. With the assault made by the mob on this sentinel, the fatal affray began which sealed the cause of the colonists with their blood. At this time the tavern enjoyed the patronage of the newly arrived British officers of the army and navy as well as of citizens or placemen, of the Tory party, so that its inmates must have witnessed, with peculiar feelings, every incident of that night of terror. Consequently the house with its sign is shown in Revere's well-known picture of the massacre. One more old hostelry in this vicinity merits a word from us. Though not going so far back or coming down to so late a date as some of the houses already mentioned, nevertheless it has ample claim not to be passed by in silence. The =Anchor=, otherwise the "Blew Anchor," stood on the ground now occupied by the Globe newspaper building. In early times it divided with the _State's Arms_ the patronage of the magistrates, who seem to have had a custom, perhaps not yet quite out of date, of adjourning to the ordinary over the way after transacting the business which had brought them together. So we find that the commissioners of the United Colonies, and even the reverend clergy, when they were summoned to the colonial capital to attend a synod, were usually entertained here at the _Anchor_. This fact presupposes a house having what we should now call the latest improvements, or at least possessing some advantages over its older rivals in the excellence of its table or cellarage. When Robert Turner kept it, his rooms were distinguished, after the manner of the old London inns, as the Cross Keys, Green Dragon, Anchor and Castle Chamber, Rose and Sun, Low Room, so making old associations bring in custom. It was in 1686 that John Dunton, a London bookseller whom Pope lampoons in the "Dunciad," came over to Boston to do a little business in the bookselling line. The vicinity of the town-house was then crowded with book-shops, all of which drove a thriving trade in printing and selling sermons, almanacs, or fugitive essays of a sort now quite unknown outside of a few eager collectors. The time was a critical one in New England, as she was feeling the tremor of the coming revolt which sent King James into exile; yet to read Dunton's account of men and things as he thought he saw them, one would imagine him just dropped into Arcadia, rather than breathing the threatening atmosphere of a country that was tottering on the edge of revolution.