Page 147. Then Devens looked. Richard Devens, a member of the Committee of Safety, of which Hancock and Warren were the leading spirits.
Page 147. Then haste ye, Prescott and Revere. Dr. Samuel Prescott, of Concord, joined Revere and Dawes at Lexington and started with them for Concord. They were stopped by a British patrol. Prescott escaped by leaping his horse over the roadside wall and spurred on to Concord, while his companions were taken prisoners, but soon released.
Page 147. The red-coats fire, the homespuns fall. Eight Americans were killed, four near the spot where the battle monument now stands, and four others while escaping over the fences. Their names, as recorded on the monument, were Robert Monroe, Jonas Parker, Samuel Hadley, Jonathan Harrington, Jr., Isaac Muzzy, Caleb Harrington, and John Brown, of Lexington, and Asahel Porter, of Woburn.
Page 148. New England's Chevy Chase. As Lord Percy, at the head of the relief column, marched through Roxbury, his bands playing "Yankee Doodle" in derision of the opponents he was soon to meet, he observed a boy who seemed to be exceedingly amused. He stopped and asked the boy why he was so merry. "To think," said the boy, "how you will dance by and by to Chevy Chase." Percy, who was very superstitious, was worried by the remark all day. Its point will be appreciated when it is remembered that Percy was a lineal descendant of the Earl Percy who was slain at Chevy Chase.
Page 149. We saw Davis fall dead. Captain Isaac Davis, of the Acton company. He and Abner Hosmer were killed as the Americans charged the British stationed at the North Bridge. "I haven't a man that's afraid to go!" he had exclaimed as he wheeled his company into line for the charge.
Page 150. We'd rather have spent it this way than to home. One of the veterans of the fight made this very remark to Edward Everett.
Page 153. Of man for man the sacrifice. The British lost 65 killed, 180 wounded, 28 captured; the Americans, 59 killed, 39 wounded, 5 missing.
Page 158. King David. See 2 Samuel v, 23, 24.
Page 159. Yankee Doodle. Accounts of the origin of "Yankee Doodle" are many and various. The air is very old, and nearly every country in Europe claims it. It probably reached England from Holland, and in the days of Charles I was used for some verses about Lydia Lockett and Kittie Fisher, gay ladies of the town. Afterwards, when Cromwell rode into Oxford on a pony, with his single plume fastened into a sort of knot called a "macaroni," the Cavaliers used the same air for their derisive verses. The story goes that this fact was recalled by Dr. Richard Shuckburg, of the Seventeenth Foot, when the queerly garbed provincial levies presented themselves, in June, 1755, at the camp at Albany, to take part in the campaign against the French. He wrote down the notes of the air and got the regimental band to play it. It was taken up by the Americans and became instantly popular. Verses innumerable have been attached to the air, the best known of which are "The Yankee's Return from Camp" and "The Battle of the Kegs."
Page 160. Edward Bangs. This is upon the authority of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, who states that "an autograph note of Judge Dawes, of the Harvard class of 1777, addressed to my father, says that the author of the well-known lines was Edward Bangs, who graduated with him. Mr. Bangs had, as a college boy, joined the Middlesex farmers in the pursuit of April 19, 1775. He was afterward a judge in Worcester County."