"I'm real sorry for you," said Joe, "but you don't know the news. The king's troops, from camp, in Boston, are marching right down here, to carry off all our arms that they can find."
"Are they?" was the sarcastic rejoined. "It's the best news I've heard in a long while. Wish they had my arms, this minute. They wouldn't carry them a step farther than they could help, I know. Run and tell them mine are ready, Joe."
"But, Uncle John, wait till after breakfast, you'll want to use them once more," said Martha Moulton, trying to help him into the chair that Joe had placed on the white sanded floor.
Meanwhile, Joe Devins had ears for all the sounds that penetrated the kitchen from out of doors, and he had eyes for the slices of well-browned pork and the golden hued Johnny-cake lying before the glowing coals on the broad hearth.
As the little woman bent to take up the breakfast, Joe, intent on doing some kindness for her in the way of saving treasures, asked, "Shan't I help you, Mother Moulton?"
"I reckon I am not so old that I can't lift a mite of cornbread," she replied with chilling severity.
"Oh, I didn't mean to lift THAT THING," he made haste to explain, "but to carry off things and hide 'em away, as everybody else has been doing half the night. I know a first-rate place up in the woods. Used to be a honey tree, you know, and it's just as hollow as anything. Silver spoons and things would be just as safe in it—" but Joe's words were interrupted by unusual tumult on the street and he ran off to learn the news, intending to return and get the breakfast that had been offered to him.
Presently he rushed back to the house with cheeks aflame and eyes ablaze with excitement. "They're a coming!" he cried. "They're in sight down by the rocks. They see 'em marching, the men on the hill, do!"
"You don't mean that its really true that the soldiers are coming here, RIGHT INTO OUR TOWN," cried Martha Moulton, rising in haste and bringing together with rapid flourishes to right and to left, every fragment of silver on the table. Uncle John strove to hold fast his individual spoon, but she twitched it without ceremony out from his rheumatic old fingers, and ran next to the parlor cupboard, wherein lay her movable valuables.
"What in the world shall I do with them," she cried, returning with her apron well filled with treasures, and borne down by the weight thereof.