The minute man of the Revolution! And who was he? He was the husband and father, who left the plough in the furrow, the hammer on the bench, and, kissing his wife and children, marched to die or to be free! He was the old, the middle-aged, the young. He was Captain Miles, of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march! He was Deacon Josiah Haines, of Sudbury, eighty years old, who marched with his company to South Bridge, at Concord, then joined in that hot pursuit to Lexington, and fell as gloriously as Warren at Bunker Hill. He was James Hayward, of Acton, twenty-two years old, foremost in that deadly race from Charlestown to Concord, who raised his piece at the same moment with a British soldier, each exclaiming, "You are a dead man!" The Briton dropped, shot through the heart. Hayward fell mortally wounded. "Father," said he, "I started with forty balls; I have three left. I never did such a day's work before. Tell mother not to mourn too much; and tell her whom I love more than my mother that I am not sorry I turned out." The last living link with the Revolution has long been broken; and we who stand here to-day have a sympathy with the men at the old North Bridge, which those who preceded us here at earlier celebrations could not know. With them war was a name and a tradition. When they assembled to celebrate this day, they saw a little group of tottering forms, whose pride was that, before living memory, they had been minute men of American Independence. But with us, how changed! War is no longer a tradition, half romantic and obscure. It has ravaged how many of our homes, it has wrung how many of the hearts before me? North and South, we know the pang. We do not count around us a few feeble veterans of the contest, but we are girt with a cloud of witnesses. Behold them here to-day, sharing in these pious and peaceful rites, the honored citizens whose glory it is that they were minute men of American liberty and union! These men of to-day interpret to us, with resistless eloquence, the men and the times we commemorate. Now, if never before, we understand the Revolution. Now, we know the secrets of those old hearts and homes.