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I profess they are labouring to their own prejudice; for I regard, and have ever regarded them, as honest and honourable fools, who were silly enough to run their necks into nooses and their heads against stonewalls, that a man called Stewart, and no other, should be king over them.

The British had killed and been killed by militiamen at Lexington, and had fallen back before the hail of lead from the squirrel rifles of angry farmers at the bridge at Concord. From stonewalls, fences, trees and haylofts, the Americans had picked off the British redcoats as they retreated back to Boston, and had proved themselves to be foemen that could not be despised.

When I go forth afield, . . . . I look beneath the stonewalls, where the verdure is richest, in hopes that a little company of violets, or some solitary bud, prophetic of the summer, may be there. . . . But not a wildflower have I yet found.

It was of the same dimensions in all save height, in which respect it was much inferior. The room had also a gloomier character, for the high stonewalls, as they rose and arched overhead, had the aspect of some cathedral crypt or burial-place. The windows here were narrow slits, as above, through which the different court-yards might be seen.

Down-down-down with incredible swiftness and smoothness the great machine went diving towards abysmal space! Up-up-up with incredible bumps and bouncings, trees, bushes, stonewalls went rushing to the sky!

What spell was equal to those stonewalls, what dexterity of man or friendship, or even the stronger love of woman, could make my dungeon free, or my chains vanish into "thin air?"

It was because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the assumption that stonewalls make an institution, they professed to tell when the Universities came into existence and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern Magnum Opus have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem.