The tumults of the times are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.

And yet, in the town, in that year, there could be no avoidance of history, for the streets were full of her assaults and confusions. Many nights, bells were rung throughout the city, and we knew that somewhere, a mob had formed; a house was being stoned; on some street corner, malcontents hurled branches through shop windows with cries of “Liberty and Property!” Harvard men were standing amidst the crowds, inciting them to burn, to terrify, to beat, to batter.

We would hear the steeples ringing. Those who slept with windows on the front of the house would hear a small phalanx of apprentices run past on the cobbles, going to join the fracas, planning riot with verve.

The next morning, we would hear reports of a milliner’s shop battered for importation, or an affray in a coffeehouse, gentlemen bruised, or a boy in a crowd shot mortally.

All the while, our gaunt house by the garden descended ever more into penury.

I am no believer in the fatal power of the stars; I do not hold with those ancient superstitions regarding the spiritual threads strung from the celestial bodies that tug us helpless as the spheres revolve; but nonetheless, I sometimes reflect that that most prodigious conjunction, the Transit of Venus, put a period to any simulation of happiness and ease amongst us. After Venus passed over the face of the sun, a new age began.

In the summer, we had stood on the shores of the lake, amidst the birch groves, and we had laughed like some new pantheon preparing for Creation. It seemed to me, bewildered as I was, that the world should go on unchanged in its course forever.

So little did I imagine, as I stood on the warm shores of that lake beside an English lord and heard the crickets sing, that only nine months hence, the Empire should receive its first blows; that I should hear bells rung all night, and cries of “Fire!” and lie awake in my frigid bed unable to warm myself; while outside, in the square near the Customs House, a crowd of hundreds would gather, shouting abuse at the Redcoats who stood on guard there; that this mob, full of false assurances that the King’s soldiers could not fire upon citizens, would yell their spiteful taunts —“Fire! Fire at us, you cowards!” —“We ain’t afraid!” —“Molly-boy! Bugger! Shoot for the heart!”— throwing fragments of ice and trying to knock the bearskin hats from the soldiers’ heads. The crowd would surge forward; surround the Redcoats; one would raise a plank to beat in a soldier’s head — whereupon a private stumbled, felled by thrown wood — and the soldiers, at long last, fired into the crowd.

Five citizens lay on the ice, their mouths open, their hands filled with slush.

The next day, two of them were on display, one in an apothecary shop, another lying on a table in a nearby tavern. Bono went to see the latter corpse, paying threepence.

“That ain’t much,” he said, “to pay to see history.”

“Worse than war,” saith Seneca, “is the dreadful waiting for war.”