Conformable to Mr. Turner’s announcement, we were engaged in rehearsing the airs and curtain-tunes for the satire upon the siege called The Blockade of Boston, penned by Major-General Burgoyne, famous for a notorious dandy and foppish blade, which play the officers themselves would present in Faneuil Hall come the end of October; the suite of music for this piece being supplied by the Corps of Engineers’ sapper-composer, whose previous efforts in the concert hall had met with such prodigious success, his fame, as it were, tunneling so broad a swath with so assiduous an effort through the dross of obscurity, and propped now securely against all assaults, that no detonation of critic or carper could knock him into disarray.

We played through his overture and sighing airs, his rowdy hornpipes for inebriate barbers-general; and yet, there were days when every scene which opened itself to our view as we walked about the streets seemed a coarse satire upon the siege. ’Twas not acted upon a stage, but upon the Common, upon Marlborough Street. We played comical songs for lieutenants regarding bombardment, and then issued forth to discover that, on Frog Lane, cannonballs and shells lobbed from Roxbury had tackled wooden walls and burst them through, or plowed strips in the slates of a roof, and citizens stood about, looking wonderingly at the progress of shot through wood.

These are such sights as greet the view of those who suffer siege in cities: the anxiety of violence mingled with the antics of incongruity.

I saw military washerwomen dressed in fine silk waistcoats for men, brocaded with water-stains and grime. I saw a child dead of the pox buried in a pie-cabinet. Passing through Cornhill Street alone on a misty morning, I heard a voice calling out commands in the square, with none to obey. There was no ghostly regiment, responded to those orders; just the gray stone, the blue mist, and an officer alone, hanger raised, bawling formations.

I saw Old North Meeting House pulled down for fuel. I saw Old South Meeting House stripped of its furniture and transformed into a riding-school for the cavalry so as to chagrin the rebels, who had oft let loose their rhetoric there; now gravel was strewn over its floor, the pews hauled out to make pig-troughs; and dragoons rode fierce circuits through the sanctuary, roused on by an officer screaming in the pulpit while ladies in the balcony whisked themselves with fans.

I saw men whipped for complaint or desertion; I saw men hanged, their bodies freshly at a dangle.

When it was ordered that the soldiers should bathe in salt-water twice daily to fend off disease, I saw a regiment walk into the sea at dawn.

The ocean was ruddy, as were they, and some passed into the sea from the shingle, and others rose from the sea and waded to shore. They came forth dripping, shivering, naked, and made for the land, lit by the first sun, as if the Creator had determined to make a new race of men from the foam, this one perfected, gentle, and dandled by light.