Without Bono, my days were a brown drudgery. My mother seemed defeated too by his absence, as he had long supplied her with companionship; and she and I went about our tasks without pleasure, slept without release in dreams, and ate without satiety.

Canaan, where now we lodged, was full of Whigs and rebels. We watched at night by moonlight as they lugged cannon past our door on the way to Concord and Acton. They covered kegs of gunpowder with hay.

We heard reports from Boston. The body politic was so disordered that all government seemed suspended. Soldiers patrolled through the streets, apprehending Negroes out at unseasonable hours on suspect errands. Groups of rebels, communicating by eerie whistles, carried out a nighttime justice, descending on informants silently. There was continual outcry against the troops by some — soldiers scuffling with boys, their heel-marks in the slush; girls surrounded by lanky privates.

We went about our business in the countryside, in a town of slow undulating fields and great clouds.

On the Canaan town green, the militia practiced loading and firing their muskets. We sate inside, and jumped with the reports of guns in the distance. Their officers claimed, with supercilious air, that they practiced speed and marksmanship in case the French should invade; but we all of us knew for what eventuality they prepared.

And late in March, as we all awaited some imminent fatality, Mr. Gitney sent out invitations for a pox party.