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On the night of the third of March, soon after that evening’s sunset-gun had closed the formal duties of the day, and seemingly by spontaneous will, all along the front, the bombardment was renewed with the same vigor, and was promptly responded to. But some of the British batteries had been differently disposed, as if the garrison either anticipated an attack upon their works on Bunker Hill, or a landing upon the Common, where both land and water batteries guarded approach. (See map.)

This second bombardment had been more effective in its range. One solid shot from the city reached Prospect Hill, but no appreciable damage had been done to the American works; but some houses in Boston had been penetrated by shot, and in one barrack six soldiers had been wounded. Places of safety began to be hunted for. Artificial obstructions were interposed in some open spaces for protection from random shot and shell. No detail under orders, and no call for volunteers, to break up the investment of the city, had been made. No excited commander, as on the seventeenth of June, 1775, tendered his services to lead British regulars against Cambridge, to seize and bring back for trial, as traitor, the arch-rebel of the defiant Colonists. Red uniforms were indeed resplendent in the sunlight; but there was no irrepressible impulse to assail earthworks, which had been the work of months, and not of a single night, and behind which twenty thousand countrymen eagerly awaited battle. And on this day, as before, the quiet of the graveyard on Beacon Hill was no more solemn and pervasive than was the calm and patient resting of the same twenty thousand countrymen, waiting only for some call to duty from the lips of their silent Commander-in-Chief.