 The first thing I was struck by was actually the last sentence as the image of the son of liberty going around the shops with his lamp black, which is the soot from oil lamps, kind of black carbon soot, and unpainting the word tea. It certainly makes me think of more famous events like the Boston Tea Party, although that's the real destruction of other people's property. Maybe they throw tea that doesn't belong to them into the harbor in Boston, but this seems sort of a smaller offering of one's own tea, but nonetheless something of a gathering, a really dramatic gathering where patriots are expressing their political views. Elsewhere in the second paragraph it says, a great number of inhabitants. You'd really like to know how many, how many that is compared to all of the inhabitants of Providence. And specifically some worthy women. So we know in this case the word inhabitants includes women, which sometimes it might or sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't specifically mention anyone else. We get the impression that this is not limited to people who were qualified to vote. Certainly if women are there it's not limited to qualified town voters and possibly therefore there were men and boys present. Services, servants, slaves, sailors, any number of people who would normally not be voting and acting politically in that way, even in the town meeting, but who could attend a marketplace to purchase things or in this case to refuse to purchase or to give up things or to observe. One thing that I think is intriguing too is there's an argument about tea in this. It's not just a description saying people came to burn their tea. It describes tea for you that it's needless. We don't need it. It's been detrimental to our liberty and interest and health. And that's intriguing because you can see the logic by which it's detrimental to Patriots' liberty and interest. They don't want to pay taxes on it. They don't think Parliament should be taxing this. Health is another question and it's interesting that the Patriots raised this issue of how it's supposed to be unhealthy just when Britain puts a tax on it. That's not really a common thought in the 18th century that tea is unhealthy. In fact, people take it in part for medicinal purposes. There's other information here that you can begin to pick up that in addition to throwing the tea in the fire, they throw in some newspapers and a printed copy of a speech by Lord North that they disapprove of. And you can go and track down what was Lord North probably speaking about. Rivington's paper, the New York paper, Rivington's a loyalist and he's arguing on behalf of parliamentary power. So it's interesting they throw those newspapers in the fire as well. So it's not merely getting rid of the tea. It's all that English stuff. I think one thing to notice about it is this isn't the kind of newspaper report we would expect that we would get of this happening. Even though it's written in the third person by someone describing it as if he or she was there, very authoritative, this happened. It offers opinions in places where we might expect that you'd interview someone. It doesn't interview Jane Doe and have her say, well I'm really cheerful to be throwing my tea in the fire because I don't need this noxious weed. It's the reporter telling you and the reporter using language which testifies to his and I think we can probably use the male pronoun here position. In reading these it's tricky. You will sometimes read pieces like this which talk about true friends of the country and lovers of freedom and you discover the writer is talking about the loyalists, the Tories. Because of course they think too that they're the true lovers of America and freedom. So you have to sometimes read for a while to figure that out. In this case it's pretty straightforward since they're burning Tory newspapers and throwing away tea and supporting the son of liberty.