Then followed, as the reader will remember very well, the Boston Port Bill closing that port. Then followed the bill by which any magistrate, soldier, or revenue officer, accused of murder in Massachusetts, was to be taken to England for trial--a bill justly stigmatized as an act to encourage the soldiery in shooting down peaceful citizens. Then followed other acts equally or still more unjust and tyrannous that need not be mentioned here, the indignation of the colonists growing deeper as their distress under the oppression increased, until war was inevitable. And on the 19th of April, 1775, when the profane Pitcairn discharged his “elegant pistol” at the minute-men of the veteran Capt. John Parker on the village green in Lexington, war came. Now, it was because of the stir caused by the story of this battle at Lexington that the second sea-fight of the Revolution occurred. The reader must keep steadily in mind that not only were churches lighted by candles in those days, but mails were carried up and down the country by stage coaches and on horseback and by the oft-times slower water route--in sloops and schooners. The fight at Lexington occurred on April 19th, but the news of it did not reach Machias, Maine, until Saturday, the 9th of the following month. On that day word was brought by sea to Machias, telling how the British troops had fired on the minute-men, whose present offense was that they had refused to obey when Pitcairn had shouted, “Disperse, ye villains! Damn you, why don’t you disperse?” How some had been killed and others wounded by this first onslaught; how the minute-men had at first retreated and then gathered anew for the attack; how the British were first brought to a stand and then started in a retreat so swift that when at last they were rescued by fresh troops from Boston they fell to the ground with “their tongues hanging out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase”--when all this was related in Machias, Maine, it stirred the men of the town to do a stroke against the oppressive ministry on their own account. There was at this time in the port of Machias an armed schooner called the _Margaretta_, Captain Moore, in the service of the crown, with two unarmed sloops in convoy which were loading with lumber, according to the American account, for the British in Boston, but an English account speaks of the schooner as “a mast ship,” _i.e._, a vessel loading with logs suitable for the masts of a warship. As the reader will remember, the grants of land from the crown in those days, always retained for the use of the crown all trees suitable for masts of ships that might be found on the land.