About the same time the British troops under Gage were reinforced, until they counted twelve thousand veterans. Gage, however, did not long swing on the military tree, or remain to be shaken from the Boston bough by the Yankee farmers and mechanics. He was superseded by Sir William Howe, who, in a few days after Washington’s appointment, landed at Boston, accompanied by Sir Henry Clinton and General Burgoyne. Believing that what cometh out of the mouth is more hurtful than what enters it, the American army now seized Boston Neck tightly. This contraction produced some spasms in the apoplectic-looking, newly arrived Englishmen, who moved galvanically towards Bunker’s Hill, on the opposite side of the city. To this point Colonel Prescott, with one thousand men,—including some negroes,—was despatched; and here, as is well known, he and Warren and their little party-colored regiment did such things, June 17, 1775, to General Howe and his three thousand attacking men, reinforced by Clinton during the day, as have been deemed worthy of much speaking about ever since. The brow of Bunker Hill received that day, where Warren and others fell, a scar which not even the hard monumental patch since imposed upon it can make us wish to forget. Higher praise of that scar we cannot accumulate. While these patriotic doings were going on around Boston, movements equally patriotic were pushed forward in an entirely new quarter,—movements, in fact, which resulted in hiring the coachman of the Sun to drive for the future an American emigrant wagon-train, in company with the old Western solar line. Daniel Boone, then in his forty-fifth year, having four years before blazed a-way with his rifle through the woods from North Carolina across the Cumberland Mountains to the river of the same name, led out in May, 1775, a boon company, founding a Colony on the Kentucky River, at first called Transylvania, but which subsequently threw off, with its hunting-shirt, this long Latinized cognomen, and stood at the dewy font to receive the dear old name of Kentucky. The little Colony started on good wholesome diet,—religious toleration; representatives elected by the people, from the people, for the people; and taxation only by their own representatives. Sheltered by its seclusion from the now daily swelling insurrection on the Atlantic coasts, the riflemen’s settlement grew apace, picking up its flints from the primeval rocks which propped up the neighboring Alleghany range, but pecking them for use only upon abundant game that hovered over its dinner-pots and sauce-pans, ready to drop into them at proper signals. [Illustration: WASHINGTON REVIEWS THE TROOPS AT CAMBRIDGE. (p. 251) ]