and other copper-plates." According
to Mr. Hildeburn, this small book had the honor of containing the first
portrait of Washington engraved in America. While such facts are of
trifling importance, they are, nevertheless, indications of the state of
intense feeling that existed at the time, and point the way by which the
children's books became nationalized.

In New England the very games of children centred in the events which
thrilled the country. Josiah Quincy remembered very well in after life,
how "at the age of five or six, astride my grandfather's cane and with
my little whip, I performed prodigies of valor, and more than once came
to my mother's knees declaring that I had driven the British out of
Boston." Afterwards at Phillips Academy, in Andover, between seventeen
hundred and seventy-eight and seventeen hundred and eighty-six, Josiah
and his schoolfellows "established it as a principle that every hoop,
sled, etc., should in some way bear _Thirteen_ marks as evidence of the
political character of the owner,--if which were wanting the articles
became fair prize and were condemned and forfeited without judge, jury,
or decree of admiralty."[94-A]

Other boys, such as John Quincy Adams, had tutors at home as a less
expensive means of education than the wartime price of forty dollars a
week for each child that good boarding-schools demanded. But at their
homes the children had plenty of opportunity to show their intense
enthusiasm for the cause of liberty. Years later, Mr. Adams wrote to a
Quaker friend:

"For the space of twelve months my mother with her infant children dwelt,
liable every hour of the day and of the night to be butchered in cold
blood, or taken and carried to Boston as hostages. My mother lived in
uninterrupted danger of being consumed with them all in a conflagration
kindled by a torch in the same hands which on the Seventeenth of June
[1775] lighted the fires of Charlestown."[94-B]

He was, of course, only one of many boys who saw from some height near
their homes the signs of battle, the fires of the enemy's camps, the
smoke rising from some farm fired by the British, or burned by its owner
to prevent their occupation of it. With hearts made to beat quickly by
the news that filtered through the lines, and heads made old by the
responsibility thrust upon them,--in the absence of fathers and older
brothers,--such boys as John Quincy Adams saw active service in the
capacity of post-riders beari