The house where this fine old autocrat lived and reigned is standing in Lexington now.  When you walk out through Cambridge and Arlington on your way to Concord, following the road the British took on their way out to Concord, you will pass by it.  It is a good place to stop and rest.  You will know the place by the tablet in front, on which is the legend:  “Here John Hancock and Samuel Adams were sleeping on the night of the Eighteenth of April, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-five, when aroused by Paul Revere.”

The Reverend Jonas Clark owned the house after the Reverend John Hancock, and the ministries of those two men, and their occupancy of the house, cover one hundred years and five years more.  Here the thirteen children of Jonas Clark were born, and all lived to be old men and women.  When you call there I hope you will be treated with the same gentle courtesy that I met.  If you delay not your visit too long, you will see a fine, motherly woman, with white “sausage curls” and a high back-comb, wearing a check dress and felt slippers, and she will tell you that she is over eighty, and that when her mother was a little girl she once sat on Governor Hancock’s knee and he showed her the works in his watch.

And then as you go away you will think again of what the old lady has just told you, and as you look back for a parting glance at the house, standing firm and solemn in its rusty-gray dignity, you will doff your hat to it, and mayhap murmur:  The days of man on earth—­they are but as a passing shadow!

“Here John Hancock and Samuel Adams were sleeping when aroused by Paul Revere!” Merchant-prince and agitator, horse and rider—­where are you now?  And is your sleep disturbed by dreams of British redcoats or hissing flintlocks?

Phantom British warships may lie at their moorings, swinging wide on the unforgetting tide, lanterns may hang high in the belfry of the Old North Church tower, hurried knocks and calls of defiance and hoof-beats of fast-galloping steed may echo and echo again, borne on the night-wind of the dim Past, but you heed them not!

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The Reverend John Hancock of Lexington had two sons.  John Hancock (Number Two) became pastor of the church of the North Precinct of the town of Braintree, which afterwards was to be the town of Quincy.

The nearest neighbor to the village preacher was John Adams, shoemaker and farmer.  Each Sunday in the amen corner of the Reverend John Hancock’s meetinghouse was mustered the well washed and combed brood of Mr. and Mrs. Adams.  Now, this John Adams had a son whom the Reverend John Hancock baptized, also named John, two years older than John, the son of the preacher.  And young John Adams and John Hancock (Number Three) used to fish and swim together, and go nutting, and set traps for squirrels, and help each other in fractions.  And then they would climb trees, and wrestle, and sometimes fight.  In the fights, they say, John Hancock used to get the better of his antagonist, but as an exploiter of fractions John Adams was more than his equal.