CHAPTER FOURTEEN LEXINGTON AND CONCORD.
"THE WAYSIDE INN" Saturday morning, September 7, at eleven o'clock, we left the Touraine for Auburndale, where we lunched, then to Waltham, and from there due north by what is known as Waltham Street to Lexington, striking Massachusetts Avenue just opposite the town hall.
Along this historic highway rode Paul Revere; at his heels followed the regulars of King George.

Tablets, stones, and monuments mark every known point of interest from East Lexington to Concord.
In Boston, at the head of Hull Street, Christ Church, the oldest church in the city, still stands, and bears a tablet claiming for its steeple the credit of the signals for Paul Revere; but the Old North Church in North Square, near which Revere lived and where he attended service, and from the belfry of which the lanterns were really hung, disappeared in the conflict it initiated.

In the winter of the siege of Boston the old meeting-house was pulled down by the British soldiers and used for firewood.

Fit ending of the ancient edifice which had stood for almost exactly one hundred years, and in which the three Mathers, Increase, Cotton, and Samuel,--father, son, and grandson,--had preached the unctuous doctrine of hell-fire and damnation; teaching so incendiary was bound sooner or later to consume its own habitation.
Revere was not the only messenger of warning.

For days the patriots had been anxious concerning the stores of arms and ammunition at Concord, and three days before the night of the 18th Revere himself had warned Hancock and Adams at the Clarke home in Lexington that plans were on foot in the enemies' camp to destroy the stores, whereupon a portion was removed to Sudbury and Groton.
Before Revere started on his ride, other messengers had been despatched to alarm the country, but at ten o'clock on the memorable night of the 18th he was sent for and bidden to get ready.