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[414] Connecticut forces under Knowlton, ‘to go and op-
Chap. XXXVIII.} 1775. June 17.
pose them.’

At about two hundred yards in the rear of the still unfinished breastwork, a fence of posts with two rails, set in a low stone wall, extended for about three hundred yards or more towards the Mystic. The mowers had but the day before passed over the meadows, and the grass lay on the ground in cocks and windrows. There the men of Connecticut, in pursuance of Prescott's order, took their station. Nature had provided ‘something of a breastwork,’ or a ditch had been dug many years before. They grounded arms and made a slight fortification against musket balls by interweaving the newly mown grass between the rails, and by carrying forward a post and rail fence alongside of the first, and piling the fresh hay between the two. But the line of defence was still very far from complete. Nearer the water the bank was smooth and without obstruction, declining gently for sixty or eighty yards, where it fell off abruptly. Between the rail fence and the unfinished breastwork, the space was open and remained so; the slough at the foot of the hill guarded a part of the distance; nearly a hundred yards were left almost wholly unprotected.

Brooks, afterwards governor of Massachusetts, one of Prescott's messengers, had no mode of reaching Headquarters but on foot. Having performed the long walk, he found the general anxious and perplexed. Ward saw very clearly the imprudence of risking a battle for which the army was totally unprepared. To the committee of safety which was in session, the committee of supplies expressed its concern

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