It is noteworthy that the first formal demonstration in the war, was the despatch by the British commander, Gage, April 18, 1775, of eight hundred men to destroy some colonial stores at Concord,—an irruption into the very temple of peace itself. At Lexington, half-way to their destination, this detachment was met by some seventy provincial volunteers, who entered a bayonet protest against this breach of the peace; but this mild protestation was answered by a sharp, crackling retort, which was heard all through the Colonies. It was the _mot de resistance_. The protesters retired, and the detachment, riding eight miles further, to the Emerson-ian city, scattered the ammunition and food there, and rode back again to Boston, being quickened on the way by fowling-pieces and duck-guns, discharged at the red-breasted coveys. On hearing the news of the battle of Lexington, Ethan Allen, gathering together a party of Green Mountain boys, presented himself on the evening of May 10, 1775, before the sleepy, dozy doors of Fort Ticonderoga, which were knocked open, and its commandant, De La Plaine, knocked up by a summons to surrender in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. The success of this little surprise party was much talked of, and raised more spirits than the revenue acts. Within Boston all of Gage’s forces, numbering three thousand English, Scotch, and Irish regulars, with many hired Hessians and Waldeckers, now retired; while twenty thousand very irregulars, farmers’ boys, and mechanics, with John Stark in his bear-skin coat, Israel Putnam in leather apron, and other leaders, drawn by centripetal patriotism from their ill-supplied homes, and in such accoutrements as old family chests yielded up, assembled in a tumultuous crowd at the American camp, and formed a weak line around the land side of the city. While this cord was thus stretched on the weak side of Boston,—if, indeed, she ever had a weak side,—George Washington, then forty-three years old, hitherto pursuing the double business of farmer and surveyor, overlaying both ever with the cultured ease and polish of a high-bred gentleman, already known to military men on both sides the sea by his practical capacity in their science, evinced in Braddock’s march and defeat, confessedly a large-headed, well-balanced, wise man, and of intense personal courage and patriotism, was, on the 17th June, 1775, appointed Commander-in-Chief. No statelier figure than his—over six feet in height as it was, and cased ordinarily in large, roomy buckskin trousers, a handsomely fitting blue coat and buff vest—was seen at any time in the American camp for the next eight years.