%129%.  When the 10th of May, 1775, came, the colonists had ceased to petition and had begun to fight.  In accordance with the Massachusetts Bill, General Thomas Gage had been appointed military governor of Massachusetts.  He reached Boston in May, 1774, and summoned an assembly to meet him at Salem in October.  But, alarmed at the angry state of the people, he fortified Boston Neck,—­the only land approach to the city, and countermanded the meeting.  The members, claiming that an assembly could not be dismissed before it met, gave no heed to the proclamation, but gathered at Salem and adjourned to Concord and then to Cambridge.  At Cambridge a Committee of Safety was chosen and given power to call out the troops, and steps were taken to collect ammunition and military stores.  A month later at another meeting, 12,000 “minute men” were ordered to be enrolled.  These minute men were volunteers pledged to be ready for service at a minute’s notice, and lest 12,000 should not be enough, the neighboring colonies were asked to raise the number to 20,000.

[Illustration:  Map of Country around Boston]

%130.  Concord and Lexington.%—­Meantime the arming and drilling went actively on, and powder was procured, and magazines of provisions and military stores were collected at Concord, at Worcester, at Salem, and at many other towns.  Aware of this, Gage, on the night of April 18, 1775, sent off 800 regulars to destroy the stores at Concord, a town some twenty miles from Boston.  Gage wished to keep this expedition secret, but he could not.  The fact that the troops were to march became known to the patriots in Boston, who determined to warn the minute men in the neighborhood.  Messengers were accordingly stationed at Charlestown and told to ride in every direction and rouse the people, the moment they saw lights displayed from the tower of the Old North Church in Boston.  The instant the British began to march, two lights were hung out in the tower, and the messengers sped away to do their work.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The ride of one of these men, that of Paul Revere, has become best known because of Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s Ride. Read it. ]

The road taken by the British lay through the little village of Lexington, and there (so well had the messengers done their work), about sunrise, on the morning of the 19th, the British came suddenly on a little band of minute men drawn up on the green before the meeting house.  A call to disperse was not obeyed; whereupon the British fired a volley, killing or wounding sixteen minute men, and passed on to Concord.  There they spiked three cannon, threw some cannon balls and powder into the river, destroyed some flour, set fire to the courthouse, and started back toward Boston.  But “the shot heard round the world” had indeed been fired.[2] The news had spread far and wide.  The minute men came hurrying in, and from farmhouses and hedges, from haystacks, and from behind trees