5th Sol. We have looked on mornings that promised better, I'll own. I would rather be letting down the bars in the old meadow just now, or hawing with my team down the brake; with the children by my side to pick the ripe blackberries for our morning meal, than standing here in these rags with a gun on my shoulder. Let well alone.—We could not though.
4th Sol. (Handing him a glass.) See, they are beginning to form again. It looks for all the world like a funeral train.
5th Sol. What was the Stamp Act to us, or all the acts beyond the sea that ever were acted, so long as they left us our golden fields, our Sabbath days, the quiet of the summer evening door, and the merry winter hearth. The Stamp Act? It would have been cheaper for us to have written our bills on gold-leaf, and for tea, to have drunk melted jewels, like the queen I read of once; cheaper and better, a thousand times, than the bloody cost we are paying now.
4th Sol. It was not the money, Will,—it was not the money, you know. The wrong it was. We could not be trampled on in that way,—it was not in us—we could not.
5th Sol. Ay, ay. A fine thing to get mad about was that when we sat in the door of a moonlight evening and the day's toils were done. It was easy talking then. Trampled on! I will tell you when I was nearest being trampled on, Andros,—when I lay on the ground below there last winter,—on the frozen ground, with the blood running out of my side like a river, and a great high-heeled German walking over my shoulder as if I had been a hickory log. I can tell you, Sir, that other was a moon-shiny sort of a trampling to that. I shall bear to be trampled on in figures the better for it, as long as I live. Between ourselves now—
4th Sol. There's no one here.
5th Sol. There are voices around that corner, though. Come this way.
[They pass on.
(Another group of Soldiers.)
1st Sol. Then if nothing else happens, we are off now. Hillo, Martin! Here we go again—skulking away. Hey? What do you say now? Hey, Mr. Martin, what do you say now?