sa OS, SS eae elie HY a1 ee we 
Such were some of their loud remarks, being accompanied 
with heroic gesticulations, triumphant facial expressions, their 
whole body denoting victory. And, as they marched on and 
on, some singing patriotic songs, others making fun of their 
future dead, telling how they were going to kill the soldiers, 
here and there was a comical scene. For, some women had 
table knives, broomsticks, irons, pots, and various other fight- 
ing house objects that they joined the passing crowd with as 
they ran out of their houses. : j 
Kilroi, a common soldier of the twenty-ninth regiment, was 
a notoriously bad fellow, being licentious and overbearing. 
This being the case, while the angry multitude was passing 
said regiment, Kilroi remarked: “I will never miss an oppor- 
tunity of firing upon these inhabitants, for I have always de- 
sired, ever since | have been in Boston, to kill some of them.” 
Here some of the revolutionists heard what he said, which 
caused a disturbance, whereupon the soldiers made an at- 
tack, the crowd becoming defeated. 
Quarrels, affrays, fights, disturbances of all kinds now be- 
came great; parties of soldiers began to ride through the 
streets, converting the streets of Boston into a battlefield, no 
man’s land. A band played its war music, animating the 
souls of men, women, boys and girls with the intonations of 
hate, while the deathly sounds caused the soldiers’ horses to 
pace with vigorous life. Clubs, cutlasses, and bayonets waved 
in the air; the crowd provoked resistance and an affray en- 
sued, which ended in a short time, neither side becoming vic- 
torious. 
They had come to the gate of the barrack-yard. Ensign 
Maul, standing at the gate, said to the soldiers: 
“Turn out, and I will stand by you; kill them, stick them, 
knock them down, run your bayonets through them!” 
“Ah,” said a little boy, “there is a mean fellow who has not 
paid my father for dressing his hair!” 
The soldier to whom the boy pointed, he who owed his 
father, his father being a barber, for dressing his hair, went 
close to the boy, and, with his musket, gave the boy a stroke 
on the head, which made him stagger and cry for pain. Thus, 
Crispus Attucks was standing within the distance, where, as 
he saw the boy fall in the street, went to him, picked him up, 
then passed his hand over his forhead. As he did this, he 
thought of himself when he was a slave, a little boy being 
subject to the whip of his master. Hereupon his blood began 
to run hot, his eyes to flash, his soul to become strong, while 
his muscular body took on the power of a giant; hence, he 
advanced toward the soldier, a man, a fighter, one of the 
brave English, and said to him: 
“Why have you hit this boy?” 
34 
