Ben Comee Part 1

Ben Comee.

by M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan.

CHAPTER I

BEN IS BORN IN LEXINGTON 1737--SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLFELLOWS

If you have occasion to pa.s.s through or to visit Lexington, be sure to put up at the tavern about a mile below Lexington Common on a little knoll near the main road.

In front of it stand two large elms, from one of which hangs the tavern sign. It is the best tavern in the place. You will find there good beds, good food, and a genial host. The landlord is my cousin, Colonel William Munroe, a younger brother of my old friend Edmund.

Sit with him under the trees. William will gladly tell you of the fight.

Lord Percy's reenforcements met the retreating British soldiers near the tavern. Percy and Pitcairn had a consultation in the bar-room over some grog, which John Raymond mixed for them, for John took care of the tavern that day. After they departed, the soldiers entered and helped themselves freely to liquor from the barrels in the shop. Some of their officers knocked the spigots from the barrels and let the liquor run away on the floor. The drunken soldiers became furious. They fired off their guns in the house. You can still see a bullet hole in the ceiling.

William will show you the doorway where poor John Raymond, the cripple, was shot down by the soldiers, as he was trying to escape from the bar-room, and will point out the places near by, where houses were burned by the British. And as you sit with William under the trees you will see great six or eight horse teams, laden with goods from New Hamps.h.i.+re, lumber along heavily over the road. Stages from Keene, Leominster, Lunenburg, and other towns will dash up to the door and pa.s.sengers will alight for their meals. On Sat.u.r.days and Sundays herds of cattle are driven through on their way to the Brighton cattle market.

All is bustle and activity.

[Sidenote: LEXINGTON IN EARLY TIMES]

I was born in this old house in the year 1737. In my boyhood Lexington was a dull little village unknown to fame. But the 19th of April, 1775, made the world familiar with the name. And since the bridges, which were built over the Charles River a few years later, placed the town on the main highway between Boston and the Back Country, it is now, in this year 1812, one of the most thriving places in the county.

In my childhood we were remote from the main travelled roads. The Back Country hardly existed. People were just beginning to settle the southern part of New Hamps.h.i.+re, and were in constant fear of Indians.

Their time was fully occupied in cutting down the forests, fighting the redskins, and raising a scanty crop for their own support. Occasionally a fur trader, driving a pack-horse laden with furs, pa.s.sed through the town. The huts and log houses of the first settlers were still standing, and some of the people kept up an acquaintance and correspondence with their relatives in the old country.

My grandfather used to take me on his knee and tell me of events which happened far back in the seventeenth century. His father was a Highland lad, and during the wars between King Charles and Cromwell fought for the king in a regiment of Scotch Highlanders. At the battle of Dunbar the king's army was defeated, and several thousand Scotch soldiers were taken prisoners. Among them was my great-grandfather, David McComee.

In a few days they were drawn up in a line, and each man was tied to his neighbour by stout cords around their wrists. A guard of soldiers was put over them, and they were marched to Plymouth.

There they learned that they were to be sent to the colonies, as slaves or servants, with the right to buy back their freedom.

[Sidenote: DAVID COMEE, THE REDEMPTIONER]

David McComee and some two hundred and seventy other prisoners were packed on board the s.h.i.+p _John and Sara_; and after a long voyage arrived at Charlestown, where they were sold at auction. David's master lived in Woburn, near Lexington, or, as it was then called, Cambridge Fields. He was treated in a kindly manner. A little piece of land was given him, on which he built a hut. He worked for his master on alternate days. The rest of the time was his own. In a few years David McComee had earned enough to pay back the price of his purchase money, and was no longer a redemptioner, but a free man and his own master. By this time, he was known as David Comee. He moved to Concord, and as he was a thrifty, hard-working man, before long he was the owner of a snug little farm.

In 1675 the terrible war with King Philip broke out. The Indians ravaged the land, and boasted that no white man should dare to so much as poke his nose out of his house. We had then but a little fringe of settlements extending a few miles back from the coast. Concord was on the frontier. Word came that the neighbouring town of Sudbury was attacked, and David Comee and ten companions started out to help the inhabitants.

My grandfather, who was then a small boy, said that after buckling on his iron breast and back plates, his father knelt with the family and prayed. Then he arose, kissed his wife and children, put on his steel cap, and taking his long firelock, started off to join the other men.

That afternoon they were lured into an ambuscade by the Indians, and most of them were killed. Reenforcements were sent to Sudbury. The Indians were driven off; and the next day David Comee was found lying in the water of the river meadow, scalped, and stripped of his armour and clothes.

Another Scotch redemptioner, named William Munroe, who was s.h.i.+pped to this country in the _John and Sara_, settled at Cambridge Fields or Lexington. My grandfather married his daughter Martha, and bought the place where my Cousin William now keeps the tavern.

Our family had no love for Indians. We hated them bitterly. At the present day, as we sit in our homes safe and without fear, we are apt to forget the constant dread in which the colonists lived. From 1690 till the end of the French war in 1763, few years pa.s.sed in which the men on the frontier were not fighting the redskins.

[Sidenote: BEN'S UNCLE JOHN KILLED]

In 1707 my Uncle John went "to the Eastward" in a company of soldiers to help drive off a body of French and Indians from the settlements in Maine. He was killed there in a fight near the town of York.

He was my grandfather's eldest son, just arrived at manhood. I was a small boy when grandfather died; but I can remember how he straightened up, and a fierce fire came in his eyes, when the talk was of Indians. He was a strict member of the church, and never swore, but on these occasions he made use of some Old Testament phrases and expressions which, I thought, answered the purpose very well.

You may pride yourself on your Latin and your Greek. I never got so far in my schooling. But turn this book upside down and read it. You cannot and I can.

I might have become quite a scholar, if I had been properly brought up, for I learned to do this at Millicent Mason's dame's school before I was six years old.

She sat in a chair and held a book in her lap. We stood in front of her.

She would point out the letters with her knitting-needle and ask, "What is that letter? And that? And that?" Then she would ask us what the word was. In this way, we learned our A B C's. Then one-syllable, and two-syllable words, and finally to read a book held upside down. I can do it now; and occasionally, if I find a friend reading, I surprise him by glancing over the top of the page and repeating a few lines of the text.

As I grew older, I went to the man's school and learned to read in the ordinary way. It was kept in a little old schoolhouse about twenty feet square, which stood on a knoll on the common. There was a great fireplace at one end of it; and the teacher sat in a great chair on a platform, with a table in front of him. We paid twopence a week for being taught reading, and threepence a week for "righting and siphering," as the town clerk entered it on his books.

[Sidenote: LEXINGTON COMMON]

Our teachers were young men just out of college, and the one who would serve for the smallest pay was the one always chosen. We had a new teacher every year.

At the lower end of the common was the old ramshackle meeting-house, facing down the road.

In front of the meeting-house were a couple of horse-blocks, on which the women dismounted as they rode to meeting on their pillions, behind their husbands or brothers.

On either side of the door were tacked up notices of vendues, lotteries, public proclamations, and the appointment of administrators. Between the school and the meeting-house were two pairs of stocks, in which we occasionally found some offender seated with his feet sticking out through the holes.

On the opening day of school, there was a man in each of them. One was a man who obstinately refused to go to meeting, and after being warned several times was clapped into the bilboes by the tythingman. The other was some poor vagrant who had tried to settle in the town, but because he was needy and s.h.i.+ftless he had been warned out, and as he did not go, was put in the stocks.

The school children gathered about them, seated on the hard boards, with their feet sticking out through the holes in the stocks, and discussed their crimes and punishment, and made bets as to the number of nails in the soles of their shoes. William Munroe, the blacksmith, came over from his shop with his leather ap.r.o.n on.

"Come, Sam, you want to get out of there, and sit in the seats with the righteous. It's never too late for the sinner to repent."

"Oh, go away, Bill. Let me alone. It's bad enough to sit here in these cussed stocks, till every bone in my body aches, and have the children stare at me, without you coming over to poke fun at me. I'm sick of it."

"That's right! A change of heart will do you good. See you in meeting next Sabbath."

The next day, Robert Harrington, the constable, drove up to the stocks with his cart.

"See here, Bob. Let me out. I give in. I'll go to meeting twice a day for the fifty-two Sabbaths in the year, and on lecture days and any other days that they want me to go."

[Sidenote: VAGRANTS AND SINNERS]

"All right; I'll let you out, but they will expect an acknowledgment from you of your wrong-doing, in meeting next Sabbath."

"Just let me out of these stocks, and I'll do anything they ask."

Mr. Harrington released him, and then turned to the vagrant and said, "Come, old boy, you've got to move on. We can't have you on our hands."

He took him in his cart, carried him miles away, and dumped him in the road, just as you would an old cat that you wanted to get rid of; and warned him never to come back.

Next Sabbath the sinner made a "public relation" before the meeting, in which he confessed his grievous sins and promised to amend.

My greatest friend was my cousin, Edmund Munroe, a st.u.r.dy, trustworthy boy with great common sense.