if his testimony was not invalidated by contrary
evidence of the strongest kind. For he has posi-
tively charged Mr. Manwaring with firing off a
gun out of the window. But he has confessed
in this very deposition, (see No.58) that he had
denied before a justice of the peace every word of
its contents after he had first sworn that they
were true, though he then (more than a fort-
night after the affair, to wit, March 23, when
the soldiers were gone out of the town and the
people were in possession of every thing)
thought
fit to swear to them a second time. Such a witness
destroys his own credit, if he ever had any;
which, it seems, this boy, from the sadness of
his character, never had. But, to come to a
more particular examination of the contents of
his deposition; he says in the first place, that
there were four or five men in the custom-house,
(whom he does not name, and therefore does not
pretend to have known) at the time of the sol-
diers firing, who went up stairs and pulled and
haled him after them--that one of them, a tall
man, loaded a gun twice, and gave it to him to
fire, and forced him by threats of immediate
violence to fire it off twice out of the window--
that he did not fire it against the people who were
assembled near the custom-house, but
sideways
up the street--and secondly, that Mr. Manwar-
ing and Mr. Monroe were both in the
custom-
house at the time of this firing, and that Mr.
Manwaring fired off a gun himself out of the window.