"I guess, Tom, that we will be kept too busy to get homesick."

"You think there will be lots of fighting, then? You feel certain that
there will be war?"

"War has really existed for more than a year, Tom. You know the battle
of Lexington was fought April the nineteenth of last year, and that
was the first battle of the Revolution. And since that there has been
more or less skirmishing between the `Minute Men' of New England and
the British, the most important of all these being the battle of
Bunker Hill, which took place on the seventeenth day of June of last
year."

"Our soldiers defeated the British there, didn't they, Dick!"

"Yes, they got all the better of the battle, but their ammunition gave
out and they had to retreat. Still, it was equivalent to a victory."

"That's what I thought."

"Yes, and then General Washington-who was appointed commander-in-chief
of the army by the Second Continental Congress, at Philadelphia in
May of last year, and who went to Boston and took charge of the army
on July third-kept the British penned up in Boston till about the
middle of last March, when he fortified Dorchester Heights,
overlooking Boston, the work being performed in one night, and next
morning the British, seeing what had been done and realizing that they
would be at the mercy of the patriot army if they remained in Boston,
hurriedly boarded the ships of the British fleet, then in the harbor,
and sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia."