day. On the twenty-first Peter Coffin was in Exeter answering the roll
call in the Provincial assembly--to take measures for the public safety.

His wife, Rebecca Hazelton Coffin, was as energetic and patriotic
as he. In August, 1777, everybody, old and young, turned out to defeat
Burgoyne. One soldier could not go, because he had no shirt. It was this
energetic woman, with a babe but three weeks old, who cut a web from the
loom and sat up all night to make a shirt for the soldier. August came,
the wheat was ripe for the sickle. Her husband was gone, the neighbors
also. Six miles away was a family where she thought it possible she
might obtain a harvest hand. Mounting the mare, taking the babe in her
arms, she rode through the forest only to find that all the able-bodied
young men had gone to the war. The only help to be had was a barefoot,
hatless, coatless boy of fourteen.

"He can go but he has no coat," said the mother of the boy.

"I can make him a coat," was the reply.

The boy leaped upon the pillion, rode home with the woman--went out with
his sickle to reap the bearded grain, while the house wife, taking a
meal bag for want of other material, cutting a hole in the bottom, two
holes in the sides, sewing a pair of her own stockings on for sleeves,
fulfilled her promise of providing a coat, then laid her babe beneath
the shade of a tree and bound the sheaves.

It is a picture of the trials, hardships and patriotism of the people in
the most trying hour of the revolutionary struggle.

The babe was Thomas Coffin--father of the subject of this sketch,