have £7.10 a month.” This figure was the pay of a regimental surgeon! In Boston, we may add, the carpenters cannily capitalized their patriotism, and refused to build barracks for the British troops, so that wages rose to a pound a day. And yet we now complain of the “unheard-of” extortion whereby a laborer receives more than a professional man.
But Stevens had plainly built barracks enough. He went home on furlough, and after his return became company cook. In the latter part of January, though, he “went to worke on jenuarel putmans store,” seemingly in what is now Cambridgeport. This occupied him for over a month: he made a “pare of stars,” “finished a rom on the inside,” “made Bunks,”’ “‘seling up the inside & finished the seling,” and turned out “som forms for the jenerl & som tables,” almost up to the Evacuation of Boston in March.
Stevens’s careful distinction between the barracks “afore the colig” and those “in the yard” suggests that the latter were placed on the unoccupied land just behind the buildings which then existed—about where University Hall now stands. This would be a very natural location, especially if (as seems probable) there was a row of breastworks nearly on the line of the present Quincy Street.[1] Certainly the Yard at this date was
- ↑ Cf. note, p. 57, ante
