Brown and Ensign De
Berniere (or Bernicre, as the name is sometimes spelled) and sent them
out to map the roads.

The little expedition was somewhat absurd, for the disguise which the
officers wore was sufficient to conceal them only from their friends.
When, at the first tavern at which they stopped, they remarked that it
was a very fine country, the black woman who waited on them answered,
"So it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it, and if you go any
higher you will find it so." "This," admits Ensign De Berniere, whose
account of the expedition was left in Boston at the evacuation, and was
"printed for the information and amusement of the curious," "this
disconcerted us a good deal." From that time on, any one who took the
trouble to "eye them attentively" was in no doubt as to their real
character.

They went first to Worcester, where it was possible that the governor
might wish to send troops, to protect the courts as well as to seize
stores. The weather was rough and snowy, and the officers' task
correspondingly difficult; the countrymen, by persevering sociability,
kept them in an uneasy state of mind. After roughly mapping roads
concerning which the general should long before have had accurate
information, the two officers made their way to Sudbury, where they
hoped to rest with a sympathizer, after walking in a snow-storm for
hours. But the town doctor, though long a stranger at the house, came
to call, and the townspeople showed their host various other undesirable
attentions, so that in twenty minutes the two officers were glad to
leave the place. They arrived again safely at Worcester, "very much
fatigued, after walking thirty-two miles between two o'clock and
half-after ten at night, through a road that every step we sunk up to
the ankles, and it blowing and drifting snow all the way."

In spite of this experience, the two officers, a month later, undertook
a similar journey to Concord. In this they succeeded, returning with a
rough sketch of the roads, but bringing also their Concord host, who did
not think it safe to remain after entertaining them. They brought
information that in Concord there were "fourteen cannon (ten iron and
four brass) and two cohorns," with "a store of flour, fish, salt, and
rice; and a magazine of powder and cartridges."

They might, in their two journeys, have brought better information than
that the Concord Whigs "fired their morning gun, and mounted a guard of
t