The inferior members of the court party, in times of
high political excitement, led scarcely a more desirable life. These
remarks may serve as a preface to the following adventures, which
chanced upon a summer night, not far from a hundred years ago. The
reader, in order to avoid a long and dry detail of colonial affairs,
is requested to dispense with an account of the train of circumstances
that had caused much temporary inflammation of the popular mind.
It was near nine o'clock of a moonlight evening, when a boat
crossed the ferry with a single passenger, who had obtained his
conveyance at that unusual hour by the promise of an extra fare. While
he stood on the landing place, searching in either pocket for the
means of fulfilling his agreement, the ferryman lifted a lantern, by
the aid of which, and the newly-risen moon, he took a very accurate
survey of the stranger's figure. He was a youth of barely eighteen
years, evidently country-bred, and now, as it should seem, upon his
first visit to town. He was clad in a coarse gray coat, well worn, but
in excellent repair; his under-garments were durably constructed of
leather, and fitted tight to a pair of serviceable and well-shaped
limbs; his stockings of blue yarn were the incontrovertible work of
a mother or a sister; and on his head was a three-cornered hat,
which in its better days had perhaps sheltered the graver brow of
the lad's father.
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