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Jealousies and aspirations mingled with the claims of families left at home, and many local excitements attended the efforts of officers of the Crown to discharge their most simple duties. After the flash of Lexington and its hot heat had faded out, it was dull work to stand guard by day, lie upon the ground at night, live a life of half lazy routine, receive unequal and indifferent food, and wonder, between meals, when and how the whole affair would end. The capture of Ticonderoga, so easily affected, inclined many to regard the contest before Boston as a matter of simple, persistent pressure, with no provident conception of the vast range of conflict involved in this defiance of the British Crown, in which all Colonies must pass under the rolling chariot of war.

And yet, all these elements were not sufficiently relaxing to permit the enclosed garrison to go free. While thousands of the Minute Men were apparently listless, and taking the daily drudgery as a matter-of-course experience, not to be helped or be rid of,—there were many strong-willed men among them who held settled and controlling convictions, so that even the raw militia were generally under wise guardianship. Leading scholars and professional men, as well as ministers of the Gospel and teachers of the district schools, united their influence with that of some well-trained soldiers, to keep the force in the field at a comparatively even strength of numbers. The idle were gradually set to work, and occupation began to lighten the strain of camp life.