"Give me some wedges, a beetle [that is, a large wooden hammer],
and a few men of my own choice, and I'll take her," he said to
General Amherst. He meant to row under the stern of the ship and
wedge her rudder so that she would be helpless. Whether the plan
was carried out, we do not know, but in the morning she had blown
ashore and surrendered. Montreal, too, surrendered to the
English, and in an Indian mission near there Putnam discovered
the Indian who had taken him prisoner two years before. The chief
was delighted to see him and entertained him in his own stone
house.

When he returned to Connecticut at the end of the war, he found
himself a hero and a favorite with everybody. So many people came
to see him that at last he turned his house into an inn, and hung
out a sign on a tree in front of it. That sign is now in the
rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society at Hartford.

The next ten years, until the Revolution, he spent in peace on
his farm. Just before that war began he drove a flock of sheep
all the way to Boston for the people there who were in distress.

"The old hero, Putnam," says a letter written from Boston in
August, 1774, "arrived in town on Monday bringing with him 130
sheep from the little parish of Brooklyn. He cannot get away, he
is so much caressed both by officers and citizens."

The next spring he was ploughing in the field when a messenger
rode by bringing the news of the battle of Lexington. Putnam left
the plough in the furrow in the care of his young son Daniel, and
without stopping to change his working clothes, set off at once