When the news was first received of troops being ordered to Boston, broad hints were thrown out that they should never land; and to strengthen the appearance of an intention to oppose them, a barrel was placed upon the beacon, supposed to be a tar barrel, to have been fired to call in the country upon the troops appearing, which was afterwards found to be an empty nail barrel. Many of the deputies came down to the convention, with instructions and dispositions to prevent the Bostonians involving the province in the fatal consequences of their own furious devices. Numbers were from the beginning sensible of the impropriety and danger of their proceeding, and desirous by a moderate conduct, to correct the one and ward off the other. The governor’s message to them after their address, was high, and might tend to keep some of them in awe, as the troops were thought to be at no great distance. When Mr. _Otis_ joined them, instead of being violent he was quite moderate: and when Mr. _Samuel Adams_ attempted to launch out into the same free and unrestrained language to which he was accustomed in the house of representatives, he was presently silenced. The convention having finished in the above manner, the persons just named assumed to themselves the moderation of those whom they called together for very different purposes. The governor himself was not always wholly ignorant of what was going forward among the sons of liberty. He kept up an acquaintance with some of them, and by that means, at times, procured useful intelligence, while he gave his informers the strongest assurance that their names should not be quoted, nor any communication be made of it, which could make them suspected. Too much occasion was given for this paragraph, which soon after appeared in the New-York Journal. “I blame the Bostonians for having given some room for the idle reports of their designing to oppose the landing of the troops, by the ridiculous puff and bombast (for which our eastern brethren have always been too famous) of warning every man to provide himself with a good firelock, ammunition, &c. under the disingenuous jesuitical pretence of the prospect of a French war, full as absurd and hypocritical as is the pretence of a military establishment in America for its protection and defence.”