Mrs. Ansart was born in Boston, and witnessed the battle of Bunker Hill, and often described the appearance of the British soldiers as they marched along past her residence, both in going to the battle and in returning. She was thirteen years of age, and recollected it perfectly. She said they were grand as they passed along the streets of Boston toward Charlestown. The officers were elegantly dressed and were in great spirits, thinking it was only a pleasant little enterprise to go over to Charlestown and drive those Yankees out of their fort; but when they returned it was a sad sight. The dead and dying were carried through the streets pale and ghastly and covered with blood. She said the people witnessed the battle from the houses in Boston, and as regiment after regiment was swept down by the terrible fire of the Americans, they said that the British were feigning to be frightened and falling down for sport; but when they saw that they did not get up again, and when the dead and wounded were brought back to Boston, the reality began to be made known, and that little frolic of taking the fort was really an ugly job, and hard to accomplish. Mrs. Ansart died in Dracut at the age of eighty-six years, January 27, 1849. She retained her mental and physical faculties to a great degree till within a short time before her death. She was accustomed to walk to church, a distance of one mile, when she was eighty years of age. Colonel and Mrs. Ansart were both buried in Woodbine Cemetery, in the part of Lowell which belonged to Dracut at the time of their interment. * * * * * BEACON HILL BEFORE THE HOUSES. BY DAVID M. BALFOUR. The visitor to the dome of the Capitol of the State, as he looks out from its lantern and beholds spread immediately beneath his feet a semi-circular space, whose radius does not exceed a quarter of a mile, covered with upward of two thousand dwelling-houses, churches, hotels, and other public edifices, does not in all probability ask himself the question: "_What did this place look like before there was any house here?_" When Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington visited Boston in 1756, on business connected with the French war, and lodged at the Cromwell's Head Tavern, a building which is still standing on the north side of School Street, upon the site of No. 13, where Mrs. Harrington now deals out coffee and "mince"-pie to her customers, Beacon Hill was a collection of pastures, owned by thirteen proprietors, in lots containing from a half to twenty acres each. The southwesterly slope of the prominence is designated upon the old maps as "Copley Hill."