As you stand there, and the shadow of old St. Paul swings around and covers you, shut your 128 eyes and listen. Something of the olden music, of the loud acclaim, may swing around with the shadow and fall on your ears, since no motion is ever spent, no sound ever still.
On that night, when the grand burst of enthusiasm had arisen, Blue-Eyed Boy said to General Washington: “I am afraid, sir, if Congress had known, they never would have done it, never! It seemed easy to do it in Philadelphia, where everything is just as it used to be; but here, with all the British ships riding in, full of soldiers, and guns enough in them to smash the old State House where they did it! If they’d only known about the ships!—”
Ah! Blue-Eyed Boy. You didn’t keep your eye very close to Congress Hall in the morning of last Thursday, or you would have heard Mr. Hancock or Mr. Thompson read to Congress a letter from General Washington, announcing the arrival of General Howe at Sandy Hook with one hundred and ten ships of war.
No, no! Blue-Eyed Boy and every other boy; the men who dared to say, and sign their names to the assertion, “A nation is born to-day,” did not do it under the rosy flush of glorious victory, but in the fast-coming shadow of mighty Britain, strong in all the power and radiant with all the pomp of war.
And what had a few little colonies to meet them with? They had, it is true, a new name, that of “States”; but cannon and camp-kettles 129 alike were wanting; the small powder mills in the Connecticut hive could yield them only a fragment of the black honey General Washington cried for, day and night, from Cambridge to New York; the houses of the inhabitants, diligently searched for fragments of lead, gave them not enough; and you know how every homestead in New England was besieged for the last yard of homespun cloth, that the country’s soldiers might not go coatless by day and tentless at night.
Brave men and women good!
Let us hurrah for them all, if it is a hundred years too late for them to hear. The men of a hundred years to come will remember our huzzas of this year, and grow, it may be, the braver and the better for them all.
But now General Washington has ridden away to his home at Number One in the Broadway; the brigade has moved on, and even Blue-Eyed Boy is hastening after General Washington, intent on taking a farewell glance, from the rampart of Fort George, at the far-away English ships.
To-morrow he will begin his homeward journey through the Jerseys. His pass is in his pocket, and as he quickens his steps, he sees groups gathering here and there, and knows that some excitement is astir in the public mind, but thinks it is all about the great Declaration.
He reaches Wall street, and the sun is at its going down. Up from the East river come the 130 sounds of orderly drummers drumming, of regimental fifers fifing. He stays his steps, and stands listening: he sees a brigade marching the “grand parade” at sunset.