This second bombardment had been more effective in its range. One solid shot from the city reached Prospect Hill, but no appreciable damage had been done to the American works; but some houses in Boston had been penetrated by shot, and in one barrack six soldiers had been wounded. Places of safety began to be hunted for. Artificial obstructions were interposed in some open spaces for protection from random shot and shell. No detail under orders, and no call for volunteers, to break up the investment of the city, had been made. No excited commander, as on the seventeenth of June, 1775, tendered his services to lead British regulars against Cambridge, to seize and bring back for trial, as traitor, the arch-rebel of the defiant Colonists. Red uniforms were indeed resplendent in the sunlight; but there was no irrepressible impulse to assail earthworks, which had been the work of months, and not of a single night, and behind which twenty thousand countrymen eagerly awaited battle. And on this day, as before, the quiet of the graveyard on Beacon Hill was no more solemn and pervasive than was the calm and patient resting of the same twenty thousand countrymen, waiting only for some call to duty from the lips of their silent Commander-in-Chief. The fourth of March closed, and the night was mild and hazy. The moon was at its full. It was a good night for rest. Possibly such a whisper as this might have pervaded the Boston barracks, and lulled anxious royalists to slumber. “Surely the rebels cannot afford further waste of powder. They impoverish themselves. Sleep on! Boston is safe!” Not so! As the sun went down, the whole American camp was alive with its teeming thousands; not ostentatiously paraded upon parapet and bastion, but patiently awaiting the meaning of a mysterious hint, which kept even the inmates of hospital tents from sleeping, that “Washington had promised them Boston on the morrow.” From “early candle-lighting” to the clear light of another dawn, incessant thunder rolled over camp and city. The same quick flashes showed that fire ran all along the line; and still, the occupants of camp and city, standing by their guns, or sheltered from their fire, dragged through the night, impatiently waiting for daylight to test the night’s experience, as daylight had done before. At earliest break of day it was announced to General Howe that “two strong rebel redoubts capped Dorchester Heights.” The news spread quickly, after the excitements of the night. There was no more easy slumber in the royal bed-chamber of British repose, nor in the luxurious apartments of the favored subjects of George III., in the city of Boston, on that fifth day of March, 1776. “If the Americans retain possession of the Heights,” said Admiral Shuldham, “I cannot keep a vessel in the harbor.” General Howe advised Lord Dartmouth that “it must have been the employment of at least twelve thousand men.”