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BOSTON AND QUEBEC.
Washington was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the realities of war and had moved in military society.

Perhaps it was an advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a regular, for he faced conditions which required an elastic mind.

The force besieging Boston consisted at first chiefly of New England militia, with companies of minute-men, so called because of their supposed readiness to fight at a minute's notice.

Washington had been told that he should find 20,000 men under his command; he found, in fact, a nominal army of 17,000, with probably not more than 14,000 effective, and the number tended to decline as the men went away to their homes after the first vivid interest gave way to the humdrum of military life.
The extensive camp before Boston, as Washington now saw it, expressed the varied character of his strange command.