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