The officers in Boston, having little active work to do, were endeavoring to forget the irksomeness and the humiliation of their situation. Through no fault of their own the position was a hard one; they had boasted, and were not allowed to make good their vainglory; they had despised their adversaries, and were cooped up in a provincial town. In letters home they uneasily endeavored to explain their inaction; by return mail they learned what the wits of London had to say of both them and the country. "Mrs. Brittania," remarked Horace Walpole, "orders her Senate to proclaim America a continent of cowards, and vote it should be starved, unless it would drink tea with her. She sends her only army to be besieged in one of her towns, and half her fleet to besiege the _terra firma_; but orders her army to do nothing, in hopes that the American Senate in Philadelphia will be so frightened at the British army being besieged in Boston that it will sue for peace." There was sting in these words, but no remedy for the smart. In order to forget such flings, and to banish the consideration of crowded quarters, irregular rations (for there still were periods of lean supply), slow pay, and inaction, the officers tried to kill time. The cavalry regiments searched for a means of exercising their horses, and Burgoyne is credited with the solution of their problem. Newell recorded in his journal how his church, after being profaned by Morrison, was examined by the colonel of the light horse, to see if the building was available for a riding-school. "But when it was considered that the Pillars must be taken away, which would bring down the roof, they altered their mind--so that the Pillars saved us." A more notable building had to suffer instead. The Old South was taken for the purpose. The furnishings were torn out, and Deacon Hubbard's carved pew was carted away to be used as a hog-sty. The dismantled church was transformed into a riding-ring, with tanbark on the floor, and a leaping-bar. One of the galleries was fitted up for a social meeting-place; the remainder were used for spectators, for whose comfort was put in a stove into which disappeared for kindling many of the books and manuscripts stored in the building. For the rest of the siege the Old South, once so formidable, was a centre of Tory fashion.