CHAPTER FOURTEEN LEXINGTON AND CONCORD
"THE WAYSIDE INN"

Saturday morning, September 7, at eleven o'clock, we left the
Touraine for Auburndale, where we lunched, then to Waltham, and
from there due north by what is known as Waltham Street to
Lexington, striking Massachusetts Avenue just opposite the town
hall.

Along this historic highway rode Paul Revere; at his heels
followed the regulars of King George. Tablets, stones, and
monuments mark every known point of interest from East Lexington
to Concord.

In Boston, at the head of Hull Street, Christ Church, the oldest
church in the city, still stands, and bears a tablet claiming for
its steeple the credit of the signals for Paul Revere; but the Old
North Church in North Square, near which Revere lived and where he
attended service, and from the belfry of which the lanterns were
really hung, disappeared in the conflict it initiated. In the
winter of the siege of Boston the old meeting-house was pulled
down by the British soldiers and used for firewood. Fit ending of
the ancient edifice which had stood for almost exactly one hundred
years, and in which the three Mathers, Increase, Cotton, and
Samuel,--father, son, and grandson,--had preached the unctuous
doctrine of hell-fire and damnation; teaching so incendiary was
bound sooner or later to consume its own habitation.

Revere was not the only messenger of warning. For days the
patriots had been anxious concerning the stores of arms and