The editor's comments on the letters was in part as follows:

"The letter in another column pleading for a memorial tablet, bearing suggested and suggestive lines from Lowell, at the grave of the two British soldiers slain at the North Bridge, Concord, should challenge attention and it is difficult to see why it should challenge antagonism. The grave is now marked by two stones half sunken in the mold with which kindly nature everywhere seeks to efface the evidences of human strife. It is protected by chains which were provided some thirty years ago by a British resident of Boston. On a stone of the wall sheltering the grave is an inscription setting forth who sleep below. Neither the inscription nor the defence was strictly necessary, for all Concord knows where the grave is, and tradition has preserved the names of the two men who buried the slain, giving them hasty but not irreverent interment. Nor has there ever been danger of vandalism. The old New England reverence for the last resting place of the dead protected the sleepers for one hundred years, and the chain fence is more the tribute of a countryman to these friendless and nameless victims of George III.'s policy than a precaution. The same spirit which protected those two soldiers' resting place would doubtless not see anything objectionable in a bronze tablet carrying Lowell's lines. Certainly the people of Concord, the descendants of the Minutemen, would be the last to feel incensed at this tribute, if tribute it be, or this reminder of permanent material, of the historic dust that must in these one hundred and thirty-four years have turned into earth.

"These two soldiers are none the less historical characters because their identity is unknown. What their names or grades neither history nor research tells. They were just common men in the ranks, in the era when the private soldier was simply so much food for powder.

"But apart from the influence of local sentiment, there is a broad public opinion that guards a soldier's sepulchre, even if he was an enemy in life. This opinion is expressed in the general custom in this country to allow both sides memorials on the great battlefields of our Civil War.

"If the suggested tablet should be erected at Concord, if 'patriotism' should at first think too much honor were done these 'hireling soldiers,' would not reflection remind that when the 'embattled farmers'—who, by the way, were led by a veteran and accomplished officer—and the regulars faced one another across the narrow stream both were proud of the name of Englishmen? Concord was then a microcosm of English America, which up to the very verge of hostilities had drunk the King's health and had clung desperately to the foolish fond belief that he was a good sovereign misled by designing ministers."

This led me to further investigate this matter, for I had been informed that the graves had been desecrated some years ago under authority of the town officials. I therefore caused to be published in the Boston Transcript under the heading of "Notes and Queries" the following query:

(7891.) 1. Can anyone give the names of the two British soldiers killed at Concord Bridge, or inform me if there were any papers taken from their bodies that would identity them? I have been informed that there were.

2. One of the soldiers was left wounded on the bridge; what was the name of the "young American that killed him with a hatchet"?

3. When did the selectmen of Concord give Professor Fowler permission to dig up the two bodies of the British soldiers and remove the skulls to be used for exhibition purposes?

J. H. S.

April 6, 1906.

MONUMENT TO COMMEMORATE THE SKIRMISH AT CONCORD BRIDGE. The letter A on the left of the engraving, marks the site of the graves of the two British Soldiers. The first killed in the Revolution.

The only answer received was the following:

"7891. 3. The indirect intimations of J. H. S. are shrewd, but before the alleged action of the selectmen excites the Concord people, they should insist upon his producing adequate evidence.

ROCKINGHAM."

The adequate evidence was produced and is as follows:

"The Worcester Society of Antiquity,
Worcester, Massachusetts, April 12, 1909.

Mr. James H. Stark,

Dear Sir:

Mr. Barton has handed your letter to me and I write to say that the skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge in Concord were once the property of this Society, we having purchased them of the Widow of Prof. Fowler, the phrenologist, who some years ago went about the country giving lectures and illustrating his subjects. Prof. Fowler got permission to dig up those skulls from the Selectmen of Concord, and he carried them about with him and used them in his lecturing. After his death one of the members learned of them and we purchased the skulls and they were in our museum some time. The late Senator Hoar learning that we had them, came to know if we would be willing to return them to Concord that they might be put back in the ground from whence they were taken. As he seemed quite anxious about it, consent was given, and they were sent to Concord to be placed in their original resting place. Presume they are there at the present time.

Yours,

ELLERY B. CRANE.
Librarian."