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“Run!” shouted Bellman Grey from the belfry. “Run and tell them that Mr. Rodney comes.”

The boy descended the staircase with a bound and a leap and a thump against the door, and announced Caesar Rodney’s approach.

In he came, weary with his eighty miles in the saddle, through heat and hunger and dust, for Delaware had sent her son in haste to the scene.

The door closed behind him and all was as still and solemn as before.

Up in the belfry the old man stroked fondly the tongue of the bell, and softly said under his breath again and again as the hours went: “They will never do it; they will never do it.”

The boy sat on the lowest step of the staircase, alternately peeping through the key-hole with eye to see and with ear to hear. At last, came a stir within the room. He peeped again. He saw Mr. Hancock, with white and solemn face, bend over the paper on the table, stretch forth his hand, and dip the pen in the ink. He watched that hand and arm curve the pen to and fro over the paper, and then he was away up the stairs like a cat.

Breathless with haste, he cried up the belfry: ” He’s a doing it, he is! I saw him through the key-hole. Mr. Hancock has put his name to that big paper on the table.”

“Go back! go back! you young fool, and keep watch, and tell me quick when to ring!” cried down the voice of Bellman Grey, as he wiped for the hundredth time the damp heat from his forehead and the dust from the iron tongue beside him.

Blue-Eyed Boy went back and peeped again just in time to see Mr. Samuel Adams in the chair, pen in hand.

One by one, in “solemn silence all,” the members wrote their names, each one knowing full well, that unless the Colonists could fight longer and stronger than Great Britain, that signature would prove his own death-warrant.

It was fitting that the men who wrote their names that day should write with solemn deliberation.

Blue-Eyed Boy peeped again. “I hope they’re almost done,” he sighed; “and I reckon they are, for Mr. Rodney has the pen now. My! how tired and hot his face looks! I don’t believe he has had any more dinner to-day than I have, and I feel most awful empty. It’s almost night by this time, too.”

At length the long list was complete. Every man then present had signed the Declaration of Independence, except Mr. Dickinson of Pennsylvania.

And now came the moment wherein the news should begin its journey around the world. The Speaker, Mr. Thompson, arose and made the announcement to the very men who already knew it.

Blue-Eyed Boy peeped with his ear and heard the words through the key-hole.

With a shout and a cry of “Ring! ring!” and a clapping of hands, he rushed upward to the belfry. The words, springing from his lips like arrows, sped their way into the ears and hands of Bellman Grey. Grasping the iron tongue of the old bell, backward and forward he hurled it a hundred times, its loud voice proclaiming to all the people that down in Independence Hall a new nation was born to the earth that day.

When the members heard its tones swinging out the joyous notes they marvelled, because no one had authorized the announcement. When the key was turned from within, and the door opened, there stood the mystery facing them, in the person of Blue-Eyed Boy.

“I told him to ring; I heard the news!” he shouted, and opened the State House doors to let the Congress out and all the world in.

You know the rest; the acclamation of the multitude, the common peals (they forgot to be careful of powder that night in the staid old city), the big bonfires, and the illuminations that rang and roared and boomed and burned from Delaware to Schuylkill.