GIFT OF 
 A. F. -.i 
 
THE ROMANCE OF OLD 
 NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
Little Pilgrimages Series 
 
 Among the Men Who Have Written 
 Famous Books, First Series 
 By E. F. Harkins 
 
 Among the Men Who Have Written 
 Famous Books, Second Series 
 By E. F. Harkins 
 
 Among the Women Who Have 
 
 Written Famous Books 
 By E. F. Harkins and C. H. L. Johnston 
 
 Literary Boston of To-Day 
 By Helen M. Winslow 
 
 The Romance of Old New England 
 Eooftrees 
 
 By Mary C. Crawford 
 
 The Romance of Old New England 
 Churches 
 
 By Mary C. Crawford 
 
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 L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 200 Summer Street, 
 
 Boston., Mass. 
 
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 SIR HARRY FRAXKLAxi) (See page 48} 
 
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 Copyright, 1902 
 
 ,L+ C.. Page & Company 
 
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 All rights reserved 
 
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 Published, September, 1QO2 
 
 Colonial tyres* 
 
 Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. 
 Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 rESE little sketches have been 
 vritten to supply what seemed 
 to the author a real need, a 
 volume which should give clearly, com- 
 pactly, and with a fair degree of readable- 
 ness, the stories connected with the surviv- 
 ing old houses of 'New England. That de- 
 lightful writer, Mr. Samuel Adams Drake, 
 has in his many works on the historic 
 mansions of colonial times, provided all 
 necessary data for the serious student, and 
 to him the deep indebtedness of this work 
 is fully and frankly acknowledged. Yet 
 there was no volume which gave entire the 
 tales of chief interest to the majority of 
 
 iii 
 
 M105G33 
 
FOBEWORI) 
 
 readers. It is, therefore, to such searchers 
 after the romantic in New England's his- 
 tory that the present book is offered. 
 
 It but remains to mention with grati- 
 tude the many kind friends far and near 
 who have helped in the preparation of the 
 material, and especially to thank Messrs. 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers of the 
 works of Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfel- 
 low, and Higginson, by permission of and 
 special arrangement with whom the selec- 
 tions of the authors named, are used ; the 
 Macmillan Co., for permission to use the 
 extracts from Lindsay Swift's " Brook 
 Farm " ; G. P. Putnam's Sons for their 
 kindness in allowing quotations from their 
 work, " Historic Towns of New England" ; 
 Small, Maynard & Co., for the use of the 
 anecdote credited to their Beacon Biogra- 
 phy of Samuel E. B. Morse ; Little, Brown 
 & Co., for their marked courtesy in the 
 iv 
 
FOKEWORD 
 
 extension of quotation privileges, and Mr. 
 Samuel T. Pickard, Whittier's literary ex- 
 ecutor, for the new Whittier material here 
 given. M. c. c. 
 
 Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1902. 
 
" All houses wherein men have lived and died are 
 haunted houses." Longfellow. 
 
 " So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find 
 out the truth of anything by history." 
 
 Plutarch. 
 
 "... Common as light is love, 
 And its familiar voice wearies not ever." 
 
 Shelley. 
 
 11 ... I discern 
 Infinite passion and the pain 
 Of finite hearts that yearn." 
 
 Browning. 
 
 " 'Tis an old tale and often told." 
 
 Scott. 
 
 VI 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Foreword iii 
 
 The Heir of Swift's Vanessa 11 
 
 The Maid of -Marblehead 37 
 
 An American-Born Baronet 59 
 
 Molly Stark's Gentleman-Son 74 
 
 A Soldier of Fortune 90 
 
 The Message of the Lanterns 104 
 
 Hancock's Dorothy Q. 117 
 Baroness Riedesel and Her Tory 
 
 Friends 130 
 Doctor Church : First Traitor to the 
 
 American Cause 147 
 A Victim of Two Revolutions 159 
 The Woman Veteran of the Con- 
 tinental Army 170 
 The Redeemed Captive 190 
 New England's First " Club Woman " 210 
 In the Reign of the Witches 225 
 Lady Wentworth of the Hall 241 
 An Historic Tragedy 251 
 Inventor Morse's Unfulfilled Ambi- 
 tion 264 
 Where the "Brothers and Sisters" 
 Met 279 
 
 vii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 The Brook Farmers 293 
 
 Margaret Fuller : Marchesa d'Ossoli 307 
 The Old Manse and Some of Its 
 
 Mosses 324 
 
 Salem's Chinese God 341 
 
 The Well-Sweep of a Song 356 
 
 Whittier's Lost Love 366 
 
LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Page 
 Sir Harry Frankland (See page 48) 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Whitehall, Newport, R. I. 31 
 Agnes Surriage Pump, Marblehead, 
 
 Mass. 39 
 Summer House, Royall Estate, Med- 
 
 ford, Mass. 63 
 Royall House, Medford, Mass. 
 
 Pepperell House, Kittery, Maine 66 
 
 Stark House, Dumbarton, N. H. 79 
 General Lee's Headquarters, Somer- 
 
 ville, Mass. 94 
 Christ Church Paul Revere House, 
 
 Boston, Mass. 104 
 
 Clark House, Lexington, Mass. 118 
 
 Dorothy Q. House, Quincy, Mass. 123 
 
 Riedesel House, Cambridge, Mass. 145 
 House Where Doctor Church Was 
 
 Confined, Cambridge, Mass. 149 
 
 Swan House, Dorchester, Mass. 161 
 
 Deborah Sampson Gannett 170 
 
 Gannett House, Sharon, Mass. 188 
 
 Williams House, Deerfield, Mass. 193 
 
 ix 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Page 
 
 Reverend Stephen Williams 204 
 Old Corner Bookstore, Site of the 
 
 Hutchinson House, Boston, Mass. 214 
 
 Old Witch House, Salem, Mass. 225 
 Rebecca Nourse House, Danvers, 
 
 Mass. 229 
 Red Horse Tavern, Sudbury, Mass. 242 
 Governor Wentworth House, Ports- 
 mouth, N. H. 246 
 Fairbanks House, Dedham, Mass. 260 
 Edes House, Birthplace of Professor 
 
 Morse, Charlestown, Mass. 264 
 Oval Parlour, Fay House, Cam- 
 bridge, Mass. 286 
 Brook Farm, West Roxbury, Mass. 296 
 Fuller House, Cambridgeport, Mass. 312 
 Old Manse, Concord, Mass. 324 
 Townsend House, Salem, Mass. 342 
 Old Oaken Bucket House, Scituate, 
 
 Mass. 359 
 Whittier's Birthplace, East Haver- 
 hill, Mass. 380 
 
THE 
 
 ROMANCE OF OLD NEW 
 ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 THE HEIE OF SWIFT'S VANESSA 
 
 71 TOWHEKE in the annals of our 
 / V^ history is recorded an odder 
 phase of curious fortune than that 
 by which Bishop Berkeley, of Cloyne, was 
 enabled early in the eighteenth century to 
 sail overseas to Newport, Rhode Island, 
 there to build (in 1729) the beautiful old 
 place, Whitehall, which is still standing. 
 Hundreds of interested visitors drive 
 every summer to the old house, to take a 
 cup of tea, to muse on the strange story 
 
 11 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 with winch the ancient dwelling is con- 
 nected, -and to pay the meed of respectful 
 n u'-inory. to .the eminent philosopher who 
 there lived and wrote. 
 
 The poet Pope once assigned to this 
 bishop " every virtue under heaven," and 
 this high reputation a study of the man's 
 character faithfully confirms. As a stu- 
 dent at Dublin University, George Berke- 
 ley won many friends, because of his 
 handsome face and lovable nature, and 
 many honours by reason of his brilliancy 
 in mathematics. Later he became a fel- 
 low of Trinity College, and made the ac- 
 quaintance of Swift, Steele, and the other 
 members of that brilliant Old World liter- 
 ary circle, by all of whom he seems to 
 have been sincerely beloved. 
 
 A large part of Berkeley's early life 
 was passed as a travelling tutor, but soon 
 after Pope had introduced him to the 
 12 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 Earl of Burlington, he was made dean 
 of Derry, through the good offices of 
 that gentleman, and of his friend, the Duke 
 of Grafton, then Lord Lieutenant of Ire- 
 land. Berkeley, however, never cared for 
 personal aggrandisement, and he had long 
 been cherishing a project which he soon 
 announced to his friends as a " scheme for 
 converting the savage Americans to Chris- 
 tianity by a college to be erected in the 
 Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles 
 of Bermuda." 
 
 In a letter from London to his life-long 
 friend and patron, Lord Percival, then at 
 Bath, we find Berkeley, under date of 
 March, 1723, writing thus of the enter- 
 prise which had gradually fired his imag- 
 ination : " It is now about ten months 
 since I have determined to spend the 
 residue of my days in Bermuda, where I 
 trust in Providence I may be the mean 
 
 13 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 instrument of doing great good to man- 
 kind. The reformation of manners among 
 the English in our western plantations, 
 and the propagation of the gospel among 
 the American savages, are two points of 
 high moment. The natural way of doing 
 this is by founding a college or seminary 
 in some convenient part of the West Indies, 
 where the English youth of our plantations 
 may be educated in such sort as to supply 
 their churches with pastors of good morals 
 and good learning a thing (God knows) 
 much wanted. In the same seminary a 
 number of young American savages may 
 also be educated until they have taken the 
 degree of Master of Arts. And being by 
 that time well instructed in the Christian 
 religion, practical mathematics, and other 
 liberal arts and sciences, and early imbued 
 with public-spirited principles and inclina- 
 tions, they may become the fittest instru- 
 14 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 ments for spreading religion, morals, and 
 civil life among their countrymen, who can 
 entertain no suspicion or jealousy of men 
 of their own blood and language, as they 
 might do of English missionaries, who can 
 never be well qualified for that work." 
 
 Berkeley then goes on to describe the 
 plans of education for American youths 
 which he had conceived, gives his reasons 
 for preferring the Bermudas as a site for 
 the college, and presents a bright vision 
 of an academic centre from which should 
 radiate numerous beautiful influences that 
 should make for Christian civilisation in 
 America. Even the gift of the best dean- 
 ery in England failed to divert him from 
 thoughts of this Utopia. " Derry," he 
 wrote, " is said to be worth 1,500 per 
 annum, but I do not consider it with a view 
 to enriching myself. I shall be perfectly 
 
 15 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 contented if it facilitates and recommends 
 rny scheme of Bermuda." 
 
 But the thing which finally made it 
 possible for Berkeley to come to America, 
 the incident which is responsible for 
 Whitehall's existence to-day in a grassy 
 valley to the south of Honeyman's Hill, 
 two miles back from the " second beach/' 
 at Newport, was the tragic ending of as 
 sad and as romantic a story as is to be 
 found anywhere in the literary life of 
 England. 
 
 Swift, as has been said, was one of the 
 friends who was of great service to Berke- 
 ley when he went up to London for the 
 first time. The witty and impecunious 
 dean had then been living in London for 
 more than four years, in his " lodging 
 in Berry Street," absorbed in the political 
 intrigue of the last years of Queen Anne, 
 and sending to Stella, in Dublin, the daily 
 16 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 journal, which so faithfully preserves the 
 incidents of those years. Under date of 
 an April Sunday in 1713, we find in this 
 journal these lines, Swift's first mention of 
 our present hero: " I went to court to-day 
 on purpose to present Mr. Berkeley, one of 
 our fellows at Trinity College. That Mr. 
 Berkeley is a very ingenious man, and a 
 great philosopher, and I have mentioned 
 him to all the ministers, and have given 
 them some of his writings, and I will 
 favour him as much as I can." 
 
 In the natural course of things Berkeley 
 soon heard much, though he saw scarcely 
 anything, of Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her 
 daughter, the latter the famous and un- 
 happy " Vanessa," both of whom were set- 
 tled at this tim,e in Berry Street, near 
 Swift, in a house where, Swift writes to 
 Stella, " I loitered hot and lazy after my 
 morning's work," and often dined " out 
 
 IT 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 of mere listlessness," keeping there " my 
 best gown and perriwig " when at Chelsea. 
 
 Mrs. Vanhomrigh was the widow of a 
 Dutch merchant, who had followed William 
 the Third to Ireland, and there obtained 
 places of profit, and her daughter, Esther, 
 or Hester, as she is variously called, was 
 a girl of eighteen when she first met Swift, 
 and fell violently in love with him. This 
 passion eventually proved the girl's perdi- 
 tion, and was, as we shall see, the cause 
 of a will which enabled Dean Berkeley to 
 carry out his dear and cherished scheme of 
 coming to America. 
 
 Swift's journal, frank about nearly 
 everything else in the man's life, is signifi- 
 cantly silent concerning Esther Vanhom- 
 righ. And in truth there was little to be 
 said to anybody, and nothing at all to be 
 confided to Stella, in regard to this un- 
 happy affair. That Swift was flattered to 
 18 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 find this girl of eighteen, with beauty and 
 accomplishment, caring so much for him, a 
 man now forty-four, and bound by honour, 
 if not by the Church, to Stella, one cannot 
 doubt. At first, their relations seem to 
 have been simply those of teacher and 
 pupil, and this phase of the matter it is 
 which is most particularly described in 
 the famous poem, " Cadenus and Vanessa/' 
 written at Windsor in 1713, and first pub- 
 lished after Vanessa's death. 
 
 Human nature has perhaps never before 
 or since presented the spectacle of a man 
 of such transcendent powers as Swift in- 
 volved in such a pitiable labyrinth of the 
 affections as marked his whole life. Pride 
 or ambition led him to postpone indefi- 
 nitely his marriage with Stella, to whom 
 he was early attached. Though he said 
 he " loved her better than his life a thou- 
 sand millions of times," he kept her 
 
 19 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 always hanging on in a state of hope de- 
 ferred, injurious alike to her peace and 
 her reputation. And because of Stella, he 
 dared not afterward with manly sincerity 
 admit his undoubted affection for Vanessa. 
 For, if one may believe Doctor Johnson, 
 he married Stella in 1716, though he 
 died without acknowledging this union, 
 and the date given would indicate that the 
 ceremony occurred while his devotion to 
 his young pupil was at its height. 
 
 Touching beyond expression is the story 
 of Vanessa after she had gone to Ireland, 
 as Stella had gone before, to be near the 
 presence of Swift. Her life was one of 
 deep seclusion, chequered only by the oc- 
 casional visits of the man she adored, 
 each of which she commemorated by 
 planting with her own hand a laurel in 
 the garden where they met. When all her 
 devotion and her offerings had failed to 
 20 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 impress him, she sent him remonstrances 
 which reflect the agony of her mind : 
 
 " The reason I write to you," she says, 
 " is because I cannot tell it you should I 
 see you. For when I begin to complain, 
 then you are angry; and there is some- 
 thing in your looks so awful, that it strikes 
 me dumb. Oh ! that you may have but 
 so much regard for me left that this com- 
 plaint may touch your soul with pity. I 
 say as little as ever I can. Did you but 
 know what I thought, I am sure it would 
 move you to forgive me, and believe that I 
 cannot help telling you this and live." 
 
 Swift replies with the letter full of ex- 
 cuses for not seeing her oftener, and ad- 
 vises her to " quit this scoundrel island." 
 Yet he assures her in the same breath, 
 " que jamais personne du monde a ete 
 aimee, honoree, estime*e, adore"e, par votre 
 ami que vous." 
 
 21 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 The tragedy continued to deepen as it 
 approached the close. Eight years had 
 Vanessa nursed in solitude the hopeless 
 attachment. At length (in 1723) she wrote 
 to Stella to ascertain the nature of the 
 connection between her and Swift. The 
 latter obtained the fatal letter, and rode 
 instantly to Marley Abbey, the residence 
 of Vanessa. " As he entered the apart- 
 ment," to quote the picturesque language 
 Scott has used in recording the scene, " the 
 sternness of his countenance, which was 
 peculiarly formed to express the stronger 
 passions, struck the unfortunate Vanessa 
 with such terror, that she could scarce ask 
 whether he would not sit down. He an- 
 swered by flinging a letter on the table; 
 and instantly leaving the house, mounted 
 his horse, and returned to Dublin. When 
 Vanessa opened the packet, she found only 
 her own letter to Stella. It was her death- 
 22 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 warrant. She sunk at once under the 
 disappointment of the delayed, yet cher- 
 ished hopes which had so long sickened 
 her heart, and beneath the unrestrained 
 wrath of him for whose sake she had in- 
 dulged them. How long she survived this 
 last interview is uncertain, but the time 
 does not seem to have exceeded a few 
 weeks." 
 
 Strength to revoke a will made in 
 favour of Swift, and to sign another (dated 
 May 1, 1723) which divided her estate 
 between Bishop Berkeley and Judge Mar- 
 shall, the poor young woman managed 
 to summon from somewhere, however. 
 Berkeley she knew very slightly, and Mar- 
 shall scarcely better. But to them both she 
 entrusted as executors her correspondence 
 with Swift, and the poem, " Cadenus and 
 Vanessa," which she ordered to be pub- 
 lished after her death. 
 
 23 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Doctor Johnson, in his " Life of Swift/' 
 says of Vanessa's relation to the misan- 
 thropic dean, " She was a young woman 
 fond of literature) whom Decanus, the 
 dean (called Cadenus by transposition of 
 the letters), took pleasure in directing and 
 interesting till, from being proud of his 
 praise, she grew fond of his person. Swift 
 was then about forty-seven, at the age 
 when vanity is strongly excited by the 
 amorous attention of a young woman." 
 
 The poem with which these two lovers 
 are always connected, was founded, ac- 
 cording to the story, on an offer of mar- 
 riage made by Miss Vanhomrigh to Doctor 
 Swift. In it, Swift thus describes his 
 situation : 
 
 " Cadenus, common forms apart, 
 In every scene had kept his heart ; 
 Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ 
 For pastime, or to show his wit, 
 But books and time and state affairs 
 24 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Had spoiled his fashionable airs ; 
 He now could praise, esteem, approve, 
 But understood not what was love : 
 His conduct might have made him styled 
 A father and the nymph his child. 
 That innocent delight he took 
 To see the virgin mind her book, 
 Was but the master's secret joy 
 In school to hear the finest boy." 
 
 That Swift was not always, however, so 
 Platonic and fatherly in his expressions 
 of affection for Vanessa, is shown in a 
 " Poem to Love," found in Miss Vanhom- 
 righ's desk after her death, in his hand- 
 writing. One verse of this runs : 
 
 " In all I wish how happy should I be, 
 
 Thou grand deluder, were it not for thee. 
 
 So weak thou art that fools thy power despise, 
 
 And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise." 
 
 After the poor girl's unhappy decease, 
 Swift hid himself for two months in the 
 south of Ireland. Stella was also shocked 
 by the occurrence, but when some one re- 
 
 25 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 marked in her presence, apropos of the 
 poem which had just appeared, that Va- 
 nessa must have been a remarkable woman 
 to inspire such verses, she observed with 
 perfect truth that the dean was quite capa- 
 ble of writing charmingly upon a broom- 
 stick. 
 
 Meanwhile Berkeley was informed of 
 the odd stroke of luck by which he was to 
 gain a small fortune. Characteristically, 
 his thoughts turned now more than ever 
 to his Bermuda scheme. " This provi- 
 dential event," he wrote, " having made 
 many things easy in my private affairs 
 which were otherwise before, I have high 
 hopes for Bermuda." 
 
 Swift bore Berkeley absolutely no hard 
 feeling -on account of Vanessa's substitu- 
 tion of his name in her will. He was quite 
 as cordial as ever. One of the witty dean's 
 most remarkable letters, addressed to Lord 
 26 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 Carteret, at Bath, thus describes Berkeley's 
 previous career and present mission : 
 
 " Going to England very young, about 
 thirteen years ago, the bearer of this became 
 founder of a sect called the Immaterial- 
 ists, by the force of a very curious book 
 upon that subject. . . . He is an absolute 
 philosopher with regard to money, titles, 
 and power; and for three years past has 
 been struck with a notion of founding a 
 university at Bermudas by a charter from 
 the Crown. . . . He showed me a little 
 tract which he designs to publish, and 
 there your Excellency will see his whole 
 scheme of the life academico-philosophical, 
 of a college founded for Indian scholars 
 and missionaries, where he most exorbi- 
 tantly proposes a whole hundred pounds 
 a year for himself. . . . His heart will 
 be broke if his deanery be not taken from 
 him, and left to your Excellency's disposal, 
 
 27 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROQFTREES 
 
 I discouraged him by the coldness of Courts 
 and Ministers, who will interpret all this 
 as impossible and a vision; but nothing 
 will do." 
 
 The history of Berkeley's reception in 
 London, when he came to urge his project, 
 shows convincingly the magic of the man's 
 presence and influence. His conquests 
 spread far and fast. In a generation 
 represented by Sir Robert Walpole, the 
 scheme met with encouragement from all 
 sorts of people, subscriptions soon reaching 
 5,000, and the list of promoters including 
 even Sir Robert himself. Bermuda became 
 the fashion among the wits of London, and 
 Bolingbroke wrote to Swift that he would 
 " gladly exchange Europe for its charms 
 only not in a missionary capacity." 
 
 But Berkeley was not satisfied with mere 
 subscriptions, and remembering what Lord 
 Percival had said about the protection and 
 28 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 aid of government he interceded with 
 George the First, and obtained royal en- 
 couragement to hope for a grant of 20,000 
 to endow the Bermuda college. During 
 the four years that followed, he lived in 
 London, negotiating with brokers, and 
 otherwise forwarding his enterprise of so- 
 cial idealism. With Queen Caroline, con- 
 sort of George the Second, he used to dis- 
 pute two days a week concerning his 
 favourite plan. 
 
 At last his patience was rewarded. In 
 September, 1728, we find him at Green- 
 wich, ready to sail for Rhode Island. " To- 
 morrow," he writes on September 3 to 
 Lord Percival, " we sail down the river. 
 Mr. James and Mr. Dalton go with me; 
 so doth my wife, a daughter of the late 
 Chief Justice Forster, whom I mar- 
 ried since I saw your lordship. I chose 
 her for her qualities of mind, and her un- 
 
 29 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 affected inclination to books. She goes 
 with great thankfulness, to live a plain 
 farmer's life, and wear stuff of her own 
 spinning. I have presented her with a 
 spinning-wheel. Her fortune was 2,000 
 originally, but travelling and exchange 
 have reduced it to less than 1,500 English 
 money. I have placed that, and about 
 600 of my own, in South Sea annuities." 
 
 Thus in the forty-fourth year of his life, 
 in deep devotion to his Ideal, and full of 
 glowing visions of a Fifth Empire in the 
 West, Berkeley sailed for Ehode Island in 
 a " hired ship of two hundred and fifty 
 tons." 
 
 The New England Courier of that time 
 gives this picture of his disembarkation 
 at Newport : " Yesterday there arrived 
 here Dean Berkeley, of Londonderry. He 
 is a gentleman of middle stature, of an 
 agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He 
 30 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 was ushered into the town with a great 
 number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved 
 himself after a very complaisant manner." 
 
 So favourably was Berkeley impressed 
 by Newport that he wrote to Lord Perci- 
 val : " I should not demur about situating 
 our college here." And as it turned out, 
 Newport was the place with which Berke- 
 ley's scheme was to be connected in history. 
 For it was there that he lived all three 
 years of his stay, hopefully awaiting from 
 England the favourable news that never 
 came. 
 
 In loyal remembrance of the palace of 
 his monarchs, he named his spacious home 
 in the sequestered valley Whitehall. Here 
 he began domestic life, and became the 
 father of a family. The neighbouring 
 groves and the cliffs that skirt the coast 
 offered shade and silence and solitude very 
 soothing to his spirit, and one wonders not 
 
 31 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 that he wrote, under the projecting rock 
 that still bears his name, " The Minute 
 Philosopher," one of his most noted works. 
 The friends with whom he had crossed the 
 ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solici- 
 tations could withdraw him from the quiet 
 of his island home. " After my long 
 fatigue of business," he told Lord Perci- 
 val, " this retirement is very agreeable to 
 me ; and my wife loves a country life and 
 books as well as to pass her time contin- 
 ually and cheerfully without any other 
 conversation than her husband and the 
 dead." For the wife was a mystic and a 
 quietist. 
 
 But though Berkeley waited patiently 
 for developments which should denote the 
 realisation of his hopes, he waited always 
 in vain. From the first he had so planned 
 his enterprise that it was at the mercy of 
 Sir Robert Walpole ; and at last came the 
 82 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 crisis of the project, with which the astute 
 financier had never really sympathised. 
 Early in 1730, Walpole threw off the 
 mask. " If you put the question to me 
 as a minister," he wrote Lord Percival, 
 " I must and can assure you that the money 
 shall most undoubtedly be paid as soon 
 as suits with public convenience; but if 
 you ask me as a friend whether Dean 
 Berkeley should continue in America, ex- 
 pecting the payment of 200,000, I advise 
 him by all means to return to Europe, and 
 to give up his present expectations." 
 
 When acquainted by his friend Percival 
 with this frank statement, Berkeley ac- 
 cepted the blow as a philosopher should. 
 Brave and resolutely patient, he prepared 
 for departure. His books he left as a gift 
 to the library of Yale College, and his 
 farm of Whitehall was made over to the 
 same institution, to found three scholar- 
 
 33 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 ships for the encouragement of Greek and 
 Latin study. His visit was thus far from 
 being barren of results. He supplied a 
 decided stimulus to higher education in 
 the colonies, in that he gave out counsel 
 and help to the men already working 
 for the cause of learning in the new coun- 
 try. And he helped to form in Newport 
 a philosophical reunion, the effects of 
 which were long felt. 
 
 In the autumn of 1731 he sailed from 
 Boston for London, where he arrived in 
 January of the next year. There a bishop- 
 ric and twenty years of useful and honour- 
 able labour awaited him. He died at Ox- 
 ford, whence he had removed from his see 
 at Cloyne, on Sunday evening, January 
 14, 1753, while reading aloud to his family 
 the burial service portion of Corinthians. 
 He was buried in the Cathedral of Christ 
 Church. 
 34 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 Of the traces he left at Newport, there 
 still remain, beside the house, a chair in 
 which he was wont to write, a few books 
 and papers, the organ presented by him to 
 Trinity Church, the big family portrait, 
 by Smibert and the little grave in 
 Trinity churchyard, where, on the south 
 side of the Kay monument, sleeps " Lucia 
 Berkeley, obi it, the fifth of September, 
 1731." Moreover the memory of the man's 
 beautiful, unselfish life pervades this sec- 
 tion of Rhode Island, and the story of his 
 sweetness and patience under a keen and 
 unexpected disappointment furnishes one 
 of the most satisfying pages in our early 
 history. 
 
 The life of Berkeley is indeed greater 
 than anything that he did, and one wonders 
 not as one explores the young preacher's 
 noble and endearing character that the dis- 
 traught Vanessa fastened upon him, though 
 
 35 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 she knew him only by reputation, as one 
 who would make it his sacred duty to do all 
 in his power to set her memory right in a 
 censorious world. 
 
 36 
 
THE MAID OF MARBLEHEAD 
 
 all the romantic narratives which 
 enliven the pages of early colonial 
 history, none appeals more directly 
 to the interest and imagination of the 
 lover of what is picturesque than the story 
 of Agnes Surriage, the Maid of Marble- 
 head. The tale is so improbable, according 
 to every-day standards, so in form with the 
 truest sentiment, and so calculated to sat- 
 isfy every exaction of literary art, that 
 even the most credulous might be forgiven 
 for ascribing it to the fancy of the ro- 
 mancer rather than to the research of the 
 historian. 
 
 Yet when one remembers that the scene 
 
 37 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOQFTKEES 
 
 of the first act of Agnes Surriage's life 
 drama is laid in quaint old Marblehead, 
 the tale itself instantly gains in credibility. 
 For nothing would be too romantic to fit 
 Marblehead. This town is fantastic in the 
 extreme, builded, to quote Miss Alice 
 Brown, who has written delightfully of 
 Agnes and her life, " as if by a generation 
 of autocratic landowners, each with a 
 wilful bee in his bonnet." * For Marble- 
 head is no misnomer, and the early settlers 
 had to plant their houses and make their 
 streets as best they could. As a matter of 
 stern fact, every house in Marblehead had 
 to be like the wise man's in the Bible: 
 " built upon a rock." The dwellings them- 
 selves were founded upon solid ledges, 
 while the principal streets followed the nat- 
 ural valleys between. The smaller divid- 
 
 1 "Three Heroines of New England Romance." 
 Little, Brown & Co. 
 
 38 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 ing paths led each and every one of them 
 to the impressive old Town House, and to 
 that other comfortable centre of social in- 
 terests, the Fountain Inn, with its near-by 
 pump. This pump, by the bye, has a very 
 real connection with the story of Agnes 
 Surriage, for it was here, according to one 
 legend, that Charles Henry Frankland 
 first saw the maid who is the heroine of 
 our story. 
 
 The gallant Sir Harry was at this time 
 (1742) collector of the port of Boston, 
 a place to which he had been appointed 
 shortly before, by virtue of his family's 
 great influence at the court of George the 
 Second. No more distinguished house than 
 that of Frankland was indeed to be found 
 in all England at this time. A lineal de- 
 scendant of Oliver Cromwell, our hero was 
 born in Bengal, May 10, 171 6, during his 
 father's residence abroad as governor of the 
 
 39 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 East India Company's factory. The per- 
 sonal attractiveness of Frankland's whole 
 family was marked. It is even said that a 
 lady of this house was sought in marriage 
 by Charles the Second, in spite of the fact 
 that a Capulet-Montague feud must ever 
 have existed between the line of Cromwell 
 and that of Charles Stuart, 
 
 Young Harry, too, was clever as well 
 as handsome. The eldest of his father's 
 seven sons, he was educated as befitted the 
 heir to the title and to the family estate 
 at Thirkleby and Mattersea. He knew the 
 French and Latin languages well, and, 
 what is more to the point, used his mother 
 tongue with grace and elegance. Botany 
 and landscape-gardening were his chief 
 amusements, while with the great litera- 
 ture of the day he was as familiar as with 
 the great men who made it. 
 
 As early as 1738, when he was twenty- 
 40 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 two, he had come into possession of an 
 ample fortune, but when opportunity of- 
 fered to go to America with Shirley, his 
 friend, he accepted the opening with avid- 
 ity. Both young men, therefore, entered 
 the same year (1741) on their offices, the 
 one as Collector of the Port, and the other 
 as Governor of the Colony. And both rep- 
 resented socially the highest rank of that 
 day in America. 
 
 " A baronet," says Reverend Elias Na- 
 son, from whose admirable picture of Bos- 
 ton in Frankland's time all writers must 
 draw for reliable data concerning our hero, 
 "a baronet was then approached with 
 greatest deference ; a coach and four, with 
 an armorial bearing and liveried servants, 
 was a munition against indignity ; in those 
 dignitaries who, in brocade vest, gold lace 
 coat, broad ruffled sleeves, and small- 
 clothes, who, with three-cornered hat and 
 
 41 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 powdered wig, side-arms and silver shoe 
 buckles, promenaded Queen Street and the 
 Mall, spread themselves through the King's 
 Chapel, or discussed the measures of the 
 Pelhams, Walpole, and Pitt at the Rose 
 and Crown, as much of aristocratic pride, 
 as much of courtly consequence displayed 
 itself as in the frequenters of Hyde Park 
 or Regent Street." 
 
 This, then, was the manner of man who, 
 to transact some business connected with 
 Marblehead's picturesque Fort Sewall, 
 then just a-building, came riding down 
 to the rock-bound coast on the day our 
 story opens, and lost his heart at the Foun- 
 tain Inn, where he had paused for a long 
 draught of cooling ale. 
 
 For lo ! scrubbing the tavern floor there 
 
 knelt before him a beautiful child-girl of 
 
 sixteen, with black curling hair, dark eyes, 
 
 and a voice which proved to be of bird- 
 
 42 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 like sweetness when the maiden, glancing 
 up, gave her good-day to the gallant's 
 greeting. The girl's feet were bare, and 
 this so moved Frankland's compassion 
 that he gently gave her a piece of gold with 
 which to buy shoes and stockings, and rode 
 thoughtfully away to conduct his business 
 at the fort. 
 
 Yet he did not forget that charming 
 child just budding into winsome woman- 
 hood whom he had seen performing with 
 patience and grace the duties that fell to 
 her lot as the poor daughter of some hon- 
 est, hard-working fisherfolk of the town. 
 When he happened again to be in Marble- 
 head on business, he inquired at once for 
 her, and then, seeing her feet still without 
 shoes and stockings, asked a bit teasingly 
 what she had done with the money he gave 
 her. Quite frankly she replied, blushing 
 the while, that the shoes and stockings were 
 
 43 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAKD EOOFTREES 
 
 bought, but that she kept them to wear to 
 meeting. Soon after this the young col- 
 lector went to search out Agnes's parents, 
 Edward and Mary Surriage, from whom 
 he succeeded in obtaining permission to 
 remove their daughter to Boston to be edu- 
 cated as his ward. 
 
 When one reads in the old records the 
 entries for Frankland's salary, and finds 
 that they mount up to not more than 100 
 sterling a year, one wonders that the young 
 nobleman should have been so ready to 
 take upon himself the expenses of a girl's 
 elegant education. But it must be remem- 
 bered that the gallant Harry had money 
 in his own right, besides many perquisites 
 of office, which made his income a really 
 splendid one. Certainly he spared no ex- 
 pense upon his ward. She was taught 
 reading, writing, grammar, music, and em- 
 broidery by the best tutors the town could 
 44 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 provide, and she grew daily, we are told, 
 in beauty and maidenly charm. 
 
 Yet in acquiring these gifts and graces 
 she did not lose her childish sweetness 
 and simplicity, nor the pious counsel of 
 her mother, and the careful care of her 
 Marblehead pastor. Thus several years 
 passed by, years in which Agnes often vis- 
 ited with her gentle guardian the residence 
 in Roxbury of Governor Shirley and his 
 gifted wife, as well as the stately Royall 
 place out on the Medford road. 
 
 The reader who is familiar with Mr, 
 Bynner's story of Agnes Surriage will re- 
 call how delightfully Mrs. Shirley, the 
 wife of the governor, is introduced into his 
 romance, and will recollect with pleasure 
 his description of Agnes's ride to Roxbury 
 in the collector's coach. This old mansion 
 is now called the Governor Eustis House, 
 and there are those still living who remem- 
 
 45 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 ber when Madam Eustis lived there. This 
 grand dame wore a majestic turban, and 
 the tradition still lingers of madame's pet 
 toad, decked on gala days with a blue rib- 
 bon. Now the old house is sadly dilapi- 
 dated; it is shorn of its piazzas, the sign 
 " To Let " hangs often in the windows, 
 and the cupola is adorned with well-filled 
 clothes-lines. Partitions have cut the 
 house into tenements; one runs through 
 the hall, but the grand old staircase and 
 the smaller one are still there, and the mar- 
 ble floor, too, lends dignity to the back hall. 
 A few of the carved balusters are missing, 
 carried away by relic hunters. In this 
 house, which was the residence of Gov- 
 ernors Shirley and Eustis, Washington, 
 Hamilton, Burr, Franklin, and other nota- 
 bles were entertained. The old place is 
 now entirely surrounded by modern dwell- 
 ing-houses, and the pilgrim who searches 
 46 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 for it must leave the Mount Pleasant elec- 
 tric car at Shirley Street. 
 
 Yet, though Agnes as a maid was re- 
 ceived by the most aristocratic people of 
 Boston, the ladies of the leading families 
 refused to countenance her when she 
 became a fine young woman whom Sir 
 Harry Frankland loved but cared not to 
 marry. That her protector had not meant 
 at first to wrong the girl he had befriended 
 seems fairly certain, but many circum- 
 stances, such as the death of Agnes's father 
 and Frankland's own sudden elevation to 
 the baronetcy, may be held to have con- 
 spired to force them into the situation for 
 which Agnes was to pay by many a day 
 of tears and Sir Harry by many a night of 
 bitter self-reproach. 
 
 For Frankland was far from being a 
 libertine. And that he sincerely loved the 
 beautiful maid of Marblehead is certain, 
 
 47 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 He has come down to us as one of the most 
 knightly men of his time, a gentleman and 
 a scholar, who was also a sincere follower 
 of the Church of England and its teach- 
 ings. Both in manner and person he is 
 said to have greatly resembled the Earl of 
 Chesterfield, and his diary as well as his 
 portrait show him to have been at once 
 sensitive and virile ; quite the man, indeed, 
 very effectually to fascinate the low-born 
 beauty he had taught to love him. 
 
 The indignation of the ladies in town 
 toward Frankland and his ward made the 
 baronet prefer at this stage of the story ru- 
 ral Hopkinton to censorious Boston. Rev- 
 erend Roger Price, known to us as rector 
 of King's Chapel, had already land and a 
 mission church in this village, and so, when 
 Boston frowned too pointedly, Frankland 
 purchased four hundred odd acres of him, 
 and there built, in 1751, a commodious 
 48 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 mansion-house. The following year he and 
 Agnes took up their abode on the place. 
 Here Frankland passed his days, content- 
 edly pursuing his horticultural fad, an- 
 gling, hunting, overseeing his dozen slaves, 
 and reading with his intelligent companion 
 the latest works of Richardson, Steele, 
 Swift, Addison, and Pope, sent over in 
 big boxes from England. 
 
 The country about Hopkinton was then 
 as to-day a wonder of hill and valley, 
 meadow and stream, while only a dozen 
 miles or so from Frankland Hall was the 
 famous Wayside Inn. That Sir Harry's 
 Arcady never came to bore him was, per- 
 haps, due to this last fact. Whenever 
 guests were desired the men from Boston 
 could easily ride out to the inn and canter 
 over to the Hall, to enjoy the good wines 
 and the bright talk the place afforded. 
 Then the village rector was always to be 
 
 49 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 counted on for companionship and breezy 
 chat. It is significant that Sir Harry care- 
 fully observed all the forms of his relig- 
 ion, and treated Agnes with the respect 
 due a wife, though he still continued to 
 neglect the one duty which would have 
 made her really happy. 
 
 A lawsuit called the two to England 
 in 1754. At Frankland's mother's home, 
 where the eager son hastened to bring his 
 beloved one, Agnes was once more sub- 
 jected to martyrdom and social ostracism. 
 As quickly as they could get away, there- 
 fore, the young people journeyed to Lis- 
 bon, a place conspicuous, even in that day 
 of moral laxity, for its tolerance of the 
 alliance libre. Henry Fielding (who died 
 in the town) has photographically de- 
 scribed for all times its gay, sensuous life. 
 Into this unwholesome atmosphere, quite 
 new to her, though she was neither maid 
 50 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 nor wife, it was that the sweet Agnes was 
 thrust by Erankland. Very soon he was 
 to perceive the mistake of this, as well as 
 of several other phases of his selfishness. 
 
 On All Saint's Day morning, 1755, 
 when the whole populace, from beggar to 
 priest, courtier to lackey, was making its 
 way to church, the town of Lisbon was 
 shaken to its foundations by an earthquake. 
 The shock came about ten o'clock, just as 
 the Misericordia of the mass was being 
 sung in the crowded churches ; and Frank- 
 land, who was riding with a lady on his 
 way to the religious ceremony, was im- 
 mersed with his companion in the ruins of 
 some falling houses. The horses attached 
 to their carriage were instantly killed, and 
 the lady, in her terror and pain, bit through 
 the sleeve of her escort's red broadcloth 
 coat, tearing the flesh with her teeth. 
 Frankland had some awful moments for 
 
 51 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 thought as he lay there pinned down by 
 the fallen stones, and tortured by the pain 
 in his arm. 
 
 Meanwhile Agnes, waiting at home, was 
 prey to most terrible anxiety. As soon as 
 the surging streets would permit a foot 
 passenger, she ran out with all the money 
 she could lay hands on, to search for her 
 dear Sir Harry. By a lucky chance, she 
 came to the very spot where he was lying 
 white with pain, and by her offers of 
 abundant reward and by gold, which she 
 fairly showered on the men near by, she 
 succeeded in extricating him from his fear- 
 ful plight. Tenderly he was borne to a 
 neighbouring house, and there, as soon as 
 he could stand, a priest was summoned to 
 tie the knot too long ignored. He had 
 vowed, while pinned down by the weight 
 of stone, to amend his life and atone to 
 Agnes, if God in his mercy should see fit 
 52 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 to deliver him, and he wasted not a moment 
 in executing his pledge to Heaven. That 
 his spirit had been effectually chastened, 
 one reads between the lines of this entry 
 in his diary, which may still be seen in the 
 rooms of the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society in Boston : " Hope my providential 
 escape will have a lasting good effect upon 
 my mind." 
 
 In order to make his marriage doubly 
 sure, he had the ceremony performed again 
 by a clergyman of his own church on board 
 the ship which he took at once for Eng- 
 land. Then the newly married pair pro- 
 ceeded once more to Frankland's home, and 
 this time there were kisses instead of cold- 
 ness for them both. Business in Lisbon 
 soon called them back to the Continent, 
 however, and it was from Belem that they 
 sailed in April, 1750, for Boston, where 
 both were warmly welcomed by their for- 
 mer friends. 53 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEEt 
 
 In the celebrated Clarke mansion, on 
 Garden Court Street, which Sir Harry 
 purchased October 5, 1756, for 1,200, our 
 heroine now reigned queen. This house, 
 three stories high, with inlaid floors, carved 
 mantels, and stairs so broad and low that 
 Sir Harry could, and did, ride his pony up 
 and down them, was the wonder of the 
 time. It contained twenty-six rooms, and 
 was in every respect a marvel of luxury. 
 That Agnes did not forget her own people, 
 nor scorn to receive them in her fine house, 
 one is pleased to note. While here she 
 practically supported, records show, her 
 sister's children, and she welcomed always 
 when he came ashore from his voyages her 
 brother Isaac, a poor though honest sea- 
 man. 
 
 Frankland's health was not, however, all 
 that both might have wished, and the en- 
 tries in the diaries deal, at this time, al- 
 54 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 most entirely with recipes and soothing 
 drinks. In July, 1757, he sought, there- 
 fore, the post of consul-general to Lisbon, 
 where the climate seemed to him to suit 
 his condition, and there, sobered city that 
 it now was, the two again took up their 
 residence. Only once more, in 1763, was 
 Sir Harry to be in Boston. Then he came 
 for a visit, staying for a space in Hopkin- 
 ton, as well as in the city. The following 
 year he returned to the old country, and 
 in Bath, where he was drinking the waters, 
 he died January 2, 1768, at the age of 
 fifty-two. 
 
 Agnes almost immediately came back to 
 Boston, and, with her sister and her sister's 
 children, took up her residence at Hopkin- 
 ton. There she remained, living a peace- 
 ful, happy life among her flowers, her 
 friends, and her books, until the outbreak 
 of the Revolution, when it seemed to her 
 
 55 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 wise to go in to her town house. She 
 entered Boston, defended by a guard of 
 six sturdy soldiers, and was cordially re- 
 ceived by the officers in the beleaguered 
 city, especially by Burgoyne, whom she 
 had known in Lisbon. During the battle 
 of Bunker Hill, she helped nurse wounded 
 King's men, brought to her in her big 
 dining-room on Garden Court Street. As 
 an ardent Tory, however, she was persona 
 non grata in the colony, and she soon found 
 it convenient to sail for England, where, 
 until 1782, she resided on the estate of the 
 Frankland family. 
 
 At this point, Agnes ceases in a way to 
 be the proper heroine of our romance, for, 
 contrary to the canons of Jove-story art, 
 she married again, Mr. John Drew, a 
 rich banker, of Chichester, being the happy 
 man. And at Chichester she died in one 
 year's time. 
 56 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 The Hopkinton home fell, in the course 
 of time, into the hands of the Reverend 
 Mr. Nason, who was to be Frankland's 
 biographer, and who, when the original 
 house was destroyed by fire (January 3, 
 1858), built a similar mansion on the same 
 site. Here the Frankland relics were 
 carefully preserved, the fireplace, the 
 family portrait (herewith reproduced). 
 Sir Harry's silver knee buckles, and the 
 famous broadcloth coat, from the sleeve of 
 which the unfortunate lady had torn a 
 piece with her teeth on the day of the Lis- 
 bon disaster. This coat, we are told, was 
 brought back to Hopkinton by Sir Harry, 
 and hung in one of the remote chambers of 
 the house, where each year, till his de- 
 parture for the last time from the pleasant 
 village, he was wont to pass the anniver- 
 sary of the earthquake in fasting, humilia- 
 tion, and prayer. The coat, and all the 
 
 57 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 other relics, were lost in April, 1902, when, 
 for the second time, Frankland Hall was 
 razed by fire. 
 
 The ancient Fountain Inn, with its 
 " flapping sign," and the " spreading elm 
 below/ 7 long since disappeared, and its 
 well, years ago filled up, was only acci- 
 dentally discovered at a comparatively 
 recent date, when some workmen were dig- 
 ging a post hole. It was then restored as 
 an interesting landmark. This inn was 
 a favourite resort, legends tell us, for 
 jovial sea captains as well as for the gentry 
 of the town. There are even traditions that 
 pirates bold and smugglers sly at times 
 found shelter beneath its sloping roof. 
 Yet none of the many stories with which 
 its ruins are connected compares in interest 
 and charm to the absolutely true one given 
 us by history of Fair Agnes, the Maid of 
 Marblehoad. 
 58 
 
AN AMERICAN - BORN BARONET 
 
 of the most picturesque houses 
 in all Middlesex County is the 
 Royall house at Medford, a place 
 to which Sir Harry Frankland and his 
 lady used often to resort. Few of the great 
 names in colonial history are lacking, in- 
 deed, in the list of guests who were here 
 entertained in the brave days of old. 
 
 The house stands on the left-hand side 
 of the old Boston Road as you approach 
 Medford, and to-day attracts the admira- 
 tion of electric car travellers just as a 
 century and a half ago it was the focus 
 for all stage passenger's eyes. Externally 
 the building presents three stories, the 
 
 59 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 upper tier of windows being, as is usual 
 in houses of even a much later date, smaller 
 than those underneath. The house is of 
 brick, but is on three sides entirely 
 sheathed in wood, while the south end 
 stands exposed. Like several of the houses 
 we are noting, it seems to turn its back on 
 the high road. I am, however, inclined 
 to a belief that the Royall house set the 
 fashion in this matter, for Isaac, the 
 Indian nabob, was just the man to assume 
 an attitude of fine indifference to the world 
 outside his gates. When in 1837, he 
 came, a successful Antigua merchant, to 
 establish his seat here in old Charlestown, 
 and to rule on his large estate, sole mon- 
 arch of twenty-seven slaves, he probably 
 felt quite indifferent, if not superior, to 
 strangers and casual passers-by. 
 
 His petition of December, 1737, in re- 
 
 60 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTBEES 
 
 gard to the " chattels " in his train, ad- 
 dressed to the General Court, reads : 
 
 " Petition of Isaac Royall, late of An- 
 tigua, now of Charlestown, in the county 
 of Middlesex, that he removed from An- 
 tigua and brought with him among other 
 things and chattels a parcel of negroes, 
 designed for his own use, and not any of 
 them for merchandise. He prays that he 
 may not be taxed with impost." 
 
 The brick quarters which the slaves oc- 
 cupied are situated on the south side of 
 the mansion, and front upon the court- 
 yard, one side of which they enclose. These 
 may be seen on the extreme right of the 
 picture, and will remind the reader who 
 is familiar with Washington's home at 
 Mount Vernon of the quaint little stone 
 buildings in which the Father of his 
 Country was wont to house his slaves. 
 The slave buildings in Medford have re- 
 
 6J 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 mained practically unchanged, and accord- 
 ing to good authority are the last visible 
 relics of slavery in New England. 
 
 The Royall estate offered a fine example 
 of the old-fashioned garden. Emit trees 
 and shrubbery, pungent box bordering 
 trim gravel paths, and a wealth of sweet- 
 scented roses and geraniums were here to 
 be found. Even to-day the trees, the ruins 
 of the flower-beds, and the relics of mag- 
 nificent vines, are imposing as one walks 
 from the street gate seventy paces back to 
 the house-door. 
 
 The carriage visitor and in the old 
 days all the Royall guests came under this 
 head either alighted by the front en- 
 trance or passed by the broad drive under 
 the shade of the fine old elms around into 
 the courtyard paved with small white peb- 
 bles. The driveway has now become a side 
 street, and what was once an enclosed gar- 
 62 
 
SIMMER -HOUSE, ROYALL ESTATE, MEDFORD, MASS. 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 den of half an acre or more, with walks, 
 fruit, and a summer-house at the farther 
 extremity, is now the site of modern dwel- 
 lings. 
 
 This summer-house, long the favour- 
 ite resort of the family and their guests, 
 was a veritable curiosity in its way. Placed 
 upon an artificial mound with two terraces, 
 and reached by broad nights of red sand- 
 stone steps, it was architecturally a model 
 of its kind. Hither, to pay their court to the 
 daughters of the house, used to come George 
 Erving and the young Sir William Pep- 
 perell, and if the dilapidated walls (now 
 taken down, but still carefully preserved) 
 could speak, they might tell of many an 
 historic love tryst. The little house is 
 octagonal in form, and on its bell-shaped 
 roof, surmounted by a cupola, there poises 
 what was originally a figure of Mercury. 
 At present, however, the statue, bereft of 
 
 63 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 both wings and arms, cannot be said 
 greatly to resemble the dashing god. 
 
 The exterior of the summer-house is 
 highly ornamented with Ionic pilasters, 
 and taken as a whole is quaintly ruinous. 
 It is interesting to discover that it was 
 utility that led to the elevation of the 
 mound, within which was an ice-house! 
 And to get at the ice the slaves went 
 through a trap-door in the floor of this 
 Greek structure ! 
 
 Isaac Royall, the builder of the fine old 
 mansion, did not long live to enjoy his 
 noble estate, but he was succeeded by a 
 second Isaac, who, though a " colonel," was 
 altogether inclined to take more care for 
 his patrimony than for his king. When the 
 Revolution began, Colonel Royall fell upon 
 evil times. Appointed a councillor by 
 mandamus, he declined serving " from 
 timidity," as Gage says to Lord Dart- 
 64 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 mouth. Roy all's own account of his move- 
 ments after the beginning of " these trou- 
 bles," is such as to confirm the governor's 
 opinion. 
 
 He had prepared, it seems, to take pas- 
 sage for the West Indies, intending to em- 
 bark from Salem for Antigua, but having 
 gone into Boston the Sunday previous to 
 the battle of Lexington, and remained there 
 until that affair occurred, he was by the 
 course of events shut up in the town. He 
 sailed for Halifax very soon, still intend- 
 ing, as he says, to go to Antigua, but on 
 the arrival of his son-in-law, George Er- 
 ving,and his daughter, with the troops from 
 Boston, he was by them persuaded to sail 
 for England, whither his other son-in-law, 
 Sir William Pepperell (grandson of the 
 hero of Louisburg), had preceded him. It 
 is with this young Sir William Pepperell 
 that our story particularly deals. 
 
 65 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 The first Sir William had been what is 
 called a " self-made man," and had raised 
 himself from the ranks of the soldiery 
 through native genius backed by strength of 
 will. His father is first noticed in the an- 
 nals of the Isles of Shoals. The mansion 
 now seen in Kittery Point was built, in- 
 deed, partly by this oldest Pepperell known 
 to us, and partly by his more eminent son. 
 The building was once much more extensive 
 than it now appears, having been some 
 years ago shortened at either end. Until the 
 death of the elder Pepperell, in 1734, the 
 house was occupied by his own and his 
 son's families. The lawn in front reached 
 to the sea, and an avenue a quarter of a 
 mile in length, bordered by fine old trees, 
 led to the neighbouring house of Colonel 
 Sparhawk, east of the village church. The 
 first Sir William, by his will, made the 
 son of his daughter Elizabeth and of Colo- 
 66 
 
ROYALL HOUSE. MEDFORD, MASS. 
 
 PKPPERELL HOUSE, KITTERY, MAINE 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 nel Sparhawk, his residuary legatee, re- 
 quiring him at the same time to relinquish 
 the name of Sparhawk for that of Pep- 
 erell. Thus it was that the baronetcy, 
 extinct with the death of the hero of Louis- 
 burg, was revived by the king, in 1774, 
 for the benefit of this grandson. 
 
 In the Essex Institute at Salem, is pre- 
 served a two-thirds length picture of the 
 first Sir William Pepperell, painted in 
 1751 by Smibert, when the baronet was in 
 London. Of this picture, Hawthorne once 
 wrote the humourous description which fol- 
 lows : " Sir William Pepperell, in coat, 
 waistcoat and breeches, all of scarlet broad- 
 cloth, is in the cabinet of the Society ; he 
 holds a general's truncheon in his right 
 hand, and points his left toward the army 
 of New Englanders before the walls of 
 Louisburg. A bomb is represented as f al- 
 
 67 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 ling through the air it has certainly 
 been a long time in its descent." 
 
 The young William Pepperell was grad- 
 uated from Cambridge in 1766, and the 
 next year married the beautiful Elizabeth 
 Roy all. In 1774 he was chosen a member 
 of the governor's council. But when this 
 council was reorganised under the act of 
 Parliament, he fell into disgrace because 
 of his loyalty to the king. On November 
 16, 1774, the people of his own county 
 (York), passed at Wells a resolution in 
 which he was declared to have " forfeited 
 the confidence and friendship of all true 
 friends of American liberty, and ought to 
 be detested by all good men. 77 
 
 Thus denounced, the baronet retired to 
 Boston, and sailed, shortly before his 
 father-in-law's departure, for England. His 
 beautiful lady, one is saddened to learn, 
 died of smallpox ere the vessel had been 
 68 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 many days out, and was buried at Halifax. 
 In England, Sir William was allowed 500 
 per annum by the British government, and 
 was treated with much deference. He was 
 the good friend of all refugees from Amer- 
 ica, and entertained hospitably at his 
 pleasant home. His private life was irre- 
 proachable, and he died in Portman 
 Square, London, in December, 1816, at the 
 age of seventy. His vast possessions and 
 landed estate in Maine were confiscated, 
 except for the widow's dower enjoyed by 
 Lady Mary, relict of the hero of Louis- 
 burg, and her daughter, Mrs. Sparhawk. 
 Colonel Roy all, though he acted not un- 
 like his son-in-law, Sir William, has, be- 
 cause of his vacillation, far less of our 
 respect than the younger man in the mat- 
 ter of his refusal to cast in his lot with 
 that of the Revolution. In 1778 he was 
 publicly proscribed and formally banished 
 
 69 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 from Massachusetts. He thereupon took 
 up his abode in Kensington, Middlesex, 
 and from this place, in 1789, he begged 
 earnestly to be allowed to return " home " 
 to Medford, declaring he was " ever a good 
 friend of the Province," and expressing the 
 wish to marry again in his own country, 
 " where, having already had one good wife, 
 he was in hopes to get another, and in some 
 degree repair his loss." His prayer was, 
 however, refused, and he died of smallpox 
 in England, October, 1781. By his will, 
 Harvard College was given a tract of land 
 in Worcester County, for the foundation of 
 a professorship, which still bears his name. 
 It is not, however, to be supposed that in 
 war time so fine a place as the Roy all 
 mansion should have been left unoccupied. 
 When the yeomen began pouring into the 
 environs of Boston, encircling it with a 
 belt of steel, the New Hampshire levies 
 70 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 pitched their tents in Medford. They 
 found the Royall mansion in the occupancy 
 of Madam Royall and her accomplished 
 daughters, who willingly received Colonel 
 John Stark into the house as a safeguard 
 against insult, or any invasion of the estate 
 the soldiers might attempt. A few rooms 
 were accordingly set apart for the use of 
 the bluff old ranger, and he, on his part, 
 treated the family of the deserter with con- 
 siderable respect and courtesy. It is odd 
 to think that while the stately Royalls 
 were living in one part of this house, 
 General Stark and his plucky wife, Molly, 
 occupied quarters under the same roof. 
 
 The second American general to be at- 
 tracted by the luxury of the Royall man- 
 sion was that General Lee whose history 
 furnishes material for a separate chapter. 
 General Lee it was to whom the house's 
 echoing corridors suggested the name, Hob- 
 
 71 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 goblin Hall. So far as known, however, 
 no inhabitant of the Royall house has ever 
 been disturbed by strange visions or fright- 
 ful dreams. After Lee, by order of Wash- 
 ington, removed to a house situated nearer 
 his command, General Sullivan, attracted, 
 no doubt, by the superior comfort of the 
 old country-seat, laid himself open to sim- 
 ilar correction by his chief. In these two 
 cases it will be seen Washington enforced 
 his own maxim that a general should sleep 
 among his troops. 
 
 In 1810, the Roy all mansion came into 
 the possession of Jacob Tidd, in whose 
 family it remained half a century, until 
 it had almost lost its identity with the 
 timid old colonel and his kin. As " Mrs. 
 Tidd's house " it was long known in Med- 
 ford. The place was subsequently owned 
 by George L. Barr, and by George C. 
 Nichols, from whose hands it passed to that 
 72 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 of Mr. Geer, the present owner. To be 
 sure, it has sadly fallen from its high 
 estate, but it still remains one of the most 
 interesting and romantic houses in all New 
 England, and when, as happens once or 
 twice a year, the charming ladies of the 
 local patriotic society powder their hair, 
 don their great-grandmother's wedding 
 gowns and entertain in the fine old rooms, 
 it requires only a slight gift of fancy to 
 see Sir William Pepperell's lovely bride 
 one among the gay throng of fair women. 
 
 73 
 
MOLLY STAKK'S GENTLEMAN- 
 SON 
 
 the quaint ancestral homes still 
 standing in the old Granite State, 
 none is more picturesque or more 
 interesting from the historical view-point 
 than the Stark house in the little town of 
 Dunbarton, a place about five miles' drive 
 out from Concord, over one of those charm- 
 ing country roads, which properly make 
 New Hampshire the summer and autumn 
 Mecca of those who have been " long in 
 populous city pent." Rather oddly, this 
 house has, for all its great wealth of his- 
 torical interest, been little known to the 
 general public. The Starks are a conserv- 
 74 
 
OLD KEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 ative, as well as an old family, and they 
 have never seen fit to make of their 
 home a public show-house. Yet those who 
 are privileged to visit Dunbarton and its 
 chief boast, this famous house, always re- 
 member the experience as a particu- 
 larly interesting one. Seldom, indeed, can 
 one find in these days a house like this, 
 which, for more than one hundred years, 
 has been occupied by the family for whom 
 it was built, and through all the changes 
 and chances of temporal affairs has pre- 
 served the characteristics of revolutionary 
 times. 
 
 Originally Dunbarton was Starkstown. 
 An ancestor of this family, Archibald 
 Stark, was one of the original proprietors, 
 owning many hundred acres, not a few of 
 which are still in the Starks' possession. 
 Just when and by whom the place received 
 the name of the old Scottish town and royal 
 
 T5 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 castle on the Clyde, no historian seems 
 able to state with definiteness, but that the 
 present Dunbarton represents only a small 
 part of the original triangular township, 
 all are agreed. Of the big landowner, 
 Archibald Stark, the General John Stark 
 of our Revolution was a son. 
 
 Another of the original proprietors of 
 Dunbarton was a certain Captain Caleb 
 Page, whose name still clings to a rural 
 neighbourhood of the township, a cross- 
 roads section pointed out to visitors as 
 Page's Corner. And it was to Elizabeth 
 Page, the bright and capable daughter of 
 his father's old friend and neighbour, that 
 the doughty John Stark was married in 
 August, 1758, while at home on a furlough. 
 The son of this marriage was called Caleb, 
 after his maternal grandfather, and he it 
 was who built the imposing old mansion 
 of our story. 
 76 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Caleb Stark was a very remarkable man. 
 Born at Dumbarton, December 3, 17-59, he 
 was present while only a lad at the battle 
 of Bunker Hill, standing side by side with 
 some of the veteran rangers of the French 
 war, near the rail fence, which extended 
 from the redoubt to the beach of the Mystic 
 River. In order to be at this scene of con- 
 flict, the boy had left home secretly some 
 days before, mounted on his own horse, 
 and armed only with a musket. After a 
 long, hard journey, he managed to reach 
 the Roy all house in Medford, which was 
 his father's headquarters at the time, the 
 very night before the great battle. And 
 the general, though annoyed at his son's 
 manner of coming, recognised that the lad 
 had done only what a Stark must do at 
 such a time, and permitted him to take 
 part in the next day's fight. 
 
 After that, there followed for Caleb a 
 
 77 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 time of great social opportunity, which 
 transformed the clever, but unpolished 
 New Hampshire boy into as fine a young 
 gentleman as was to be found in the 
 whole country. The Royall house, it 
 will be remembered, was presided over in 
 the troublous war times by the beautiful 
 ladies of the family, than whom no more 
 cultured and distinguished women were 
 anywhere to be met. And these, though 
 Tory to the backbone, were disposed to 
 be very kind and gracious to the brave 
 boy whom the accident of war had made 
 their guest. 
 
 So it came about that even before he 
 reached manhood's estate, Caleb Stark had 
 acquired the grace and polish of Europe. 
 Nor was the lad merely a carpet knight. 
 So ably did he serve his father that he was 
 made the elder soldier's aid-de-camp, when 
 the father was made a brigadier-general, 
 78 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 and by the time the war closed, was himself 
 Major Stark, though scarcely twenty-four 
 years old. 
 
 Soon after peace was declared, the young 
 major came into his Dunbarton patrimony, 
 and in IT 84, in a very pleasant spot in the 
 midst of his estate, and facing the broad 
 highway leading from Dunbarton to 
 Weare, he began to build his now famous 
 house. It was finished the next year, and 
 in 1787, the young man, having been 
 elected town treasurer of Dunbarton, re- 
 solved to settle down in his new home, 
 and brought there as his wife, Miss Sarah 
 McKinstrey, a daughter of Doctor William 
 McKinstrey, formerly of Taunton, Mas- 
 sachusetts, a beautiful and cultivated girl, 
 just twenty years old. 
 
 It is interesting in this connection to 
 note that all the women of the Stark family 
 have been beauties, and that they have, 
 
 79 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 too, been sweet and charming in disposi- 
 tion, as well as in face. The old mansion 
 on the Weare road has been the home dur- 
 ing its one hundred and ten years of life 
 of several women who would have adorned, 
 both by reason of their personal and intel- 
 lectual charms, any position in our land. 
 This being true, it is not odd that the coun- 
 try folk speak of the Stark family with 
 deepest reverence. 
 
 Beside building the family homestead, 
 Caleb Stark did two other things which 
 serve to make him distinguished even in 
 a family where all were great. He enter- 
 tained Lafayette, and he accumulated the 
 family fortune. Both these things were 
 accomplished at Pembroke, where the 
 major early established some successful 
 cotton mills. The date of his entertain- 
 ment of Lafayette was, of course, 1825, 
 the year when the marquis, after laying the 
 80 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 corner-stone of our monument on Bunker 
 Hill, made his triumphal tour through 
 New Hampshire. 
 
 The bed upon which the great French- 
 man slept during his visit to the Starks 
 is still carefully preserved, and those 
 guests who have had the privilege of being 
 entertained by the present owners of the 
 house can bear testimony to the fact that 
 the couch is an extremely comfortable one. 
 The room in which this bed is the most 
 prominent article of furniture bears the 
 name of the Lafayette room, and is in 
 every particular furnished after the man- 
 ner of a sleeping apartment of one hundred 
 years ago. The curtains of the high bed- 
 stead, the quaint toilet-table, the bedside 
 table with its brass candlestick, and the 
 pictures and the ornaments are all in har- 
 mony. Nowhere has a discordant modern 
 note been struck. The same thing is true 
 
 81 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 of all the other apartments in the house. 
 The Starks have one and all displayed 
 great taste and decided skill in preserving 
 the long-ago tone that makes the place what 
 it is. The second Caleb, who inherited the 
 estate in 1838, when his father, the bril- 
 liant major, died, was a Harvard graduate, 
 and writer of repute, being the author of 
 a valuable memoir of his father and grand- 
 father. He collected, even more than they 
 had done, family relics of interest. When 
 he died in 1865, his two sisters, Harriett 
 and Charlotte, succeeded him in the pos- 
 session of the estate. 
 
 Only comparatively recently has this 
 latter sister died, and the place come into 
 the hands of its present owner. Mr. Charles 
 F. Morris Stark, an heir who has the tra- 
 ditions of the Morris family to add to 
 those of the Starks, being on his mother's 
 side a lineal descendant of Robert Morris, 
 82 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 the great financier of the Revolution. The 
 present Mrs. Stark is the representative of 
 still another noted New Hampshire family, 
 being the granddaughter of General John 
 McNeil, a famous soldier of the Granite 
 State. 
 
 Few, indeed, are the homes in America 
 which contain so much which, while of 
 intimate interest to the family,, is as well 
 of wide historical importance. Though a 
 home, the house has the value of a museum. 
 The portrait of Major Stark, which hangs 
 in the parlour at the right of the square en- 
 trance-hall, was painted by Professor Sam- 
 uel Finley Breese Morse, the discoverer of 
 the electric telegraph, a man who wished to 
 come down to posterity as an artist, but is 
 now remembered by us only as an inventor. 
 
 This picture is an admirable presents- 
 tion of its original. The gallant major 
 looks down upon us with a person rather 
 
 83 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 above the medium in height, of a slight 
 but muscular frame, with the short waist- 
 coat, the high collar, and the close, narrow 
 shoulders of the gentleman's costume of 
 1830. The carriage of the head is noble, 
 and the strong features, the deep-set, keen, 
 blue eyes, and the prominent forehead, 
 speak of courage, intelligence, and cool 
 self-possession. 
 
 Beside this noteworthy portrait hangs 
 a beautiful picture of the first mistress of 
 this house, the Mrs. Stark who, as a girl, 
 was Miss Sarah McKinstrey. Her portrait 
 shows her to have been a fine example of the 
 blonde type of beauty. The splendid coils 
 of her hair are very lustrous, and the dark 
 hazel eyes look out from the frame with the 
 charm and dignity of a St. Cecilia. Her 
 costume, too, is singularly appropriate and 
 becoming, azure silk with great puffs of 
 
 84 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 lace around the white arms and queenly 
 throat. The waist, girdled under the arm- 
 pits, and the long-wristed mits stamp the 
 date 1815-21. 
 
 The portrait of General Stark, which 
 was painted by Miss Hannah Crownin- 
 shield, is said not to look so much like the 
 doughty soldier as does the Morse picture 
 of his son, but Gilbert Stuart's Miss Char- 
 lotte Stark, recently deceased, shows the 
 last daughter of the family to have fairly 
 sustained in her youth the reputation for 
 beauty which goes with the Stark women. 
 
 Beside the portraits, there are in the 
 house many other choice and valuable 
 antiques. Among these the woman visitor 
 notices with particular interest the fan 
 that was once the property of Lady Pep- 
 perell, who was a daughter, it will be re- 
 membered, of the Royall family, who were 
 
 85 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 so kind to Major Caleb Stark in his youth. 
 And to the man who loves historical things, 
 the cane presented to General Stark when 
 he was a major, for valiant conduct in de- 
 fence of Fort William Henry, will be of 
 especial interest. This cane is made from 
 the bone of a whale and is headed with 
 ivory. On the mantelpiece stands another 
 very interesting souvenir, a bronze statu- 
 ette of Napoleon I., which Lafayette 
 brought with him from France and pre- 
 sented to Major Stark. 
 
 Apropos of this there is an amusing 
 story. The major was a great admirer of 
 the distinguished Bonaparte, and made a 
 collection of Napoleonic busts and pictures, 
 all of which, together with the numerous 
 other effects of the Stark place, had to be 
 appraised at his death. As it happened, 
 the appraiser was a countryman of limited 
 
 86 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 intelligence, and, when he was told to put 
 down " twelve Bonapartes," recorded 
 " twelve pony carts," and it was thus that 
 the item appeared on the legal paper. 
 
 The house itself is a not unworthy imi- 
 tation of an English manor-house, with its 
 aspect of old-time grandeur and pictur- 
 esque repose. It is of wood, two and a half 
 stories high, with twelve dormer windows, 
 a gambrel roof, and a large two-story L. 
 In front there are two rows of tall and 
 stately elms, and the trim little garden is 
 enclosed by a painted iron fence. On 
 either side of the spacious hall, which ex- 
 tends through the middle of the house, 
 are to be found handsome trophies of the 
 chase, collected by the present master of 
 the place, who is a keen sportsman. 
 
 A gorgeous carpet, which dates back 
 fifty years, having been laid in the days 
 of the beautiful Sarah, supplies the one 
 
 87 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 bit of colour in the parlour, while in the 
 dining-room the rich silver and handsome 
 mahogany testify to the old-time glories 
 of the place. Of manuscripts which are 
 simply priceless, the house contains not a 
 few; one, over the quaint wine-cooler in 
 the dining-room, acknowledging, in George 
 Washington's own hand, courtesies ex- 
 tended to him and to his lady by a member 
 of the Morris family, being especially in- 
 teresting. Up-stairs, in the sunlit hall, 
 among other treasures, more elegant but 
 not more interesting, hangs a sunbonnet 
 once worn by Molly Stark herself. 
 
 Not far off down the country road is 
 perhaps the most beautiful and attractive 
 spot in the whole town, the old family 
 burying-ground of the Starks, in which are 
 interred all the deceased members of this 
 remarkable family, from the Revolutionary 
 Major Caleb and his wife down. Here, 
 88 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 with grim, towering Kearsarge standing 
 ever like a sentinel, rests under the yew- 
 trees the dust of this great family's hon- 
 oured dead. 
 
A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 
 
 "^P^HE only time I ever heard Wash- 
 i ington swear," Lafayette once re- 
 marked, " was when he called 
 General Charles Lee a ' damned poltroon/ 
 after the arrest of that officer for treason- 
 able conduct." Nor was Washington the 
 only person of self-restraint and good man- 
 ners whose temper and angry passions 
 were roused by this same erratic General 
 Lee. 
 
 Lee was an Englishman, born in 
 Cheshire in 1731. He entered the British 
 army at the age of eleven years, was in 
 Braddock's expedition, and was wounded at 
 Ticonderoga in 1758. He also served for 
 90 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 a time in Portugal, but certain infelicities 
 of temper hindered his advancement, and 
 he never rose higher in the British service 
 than a half-pay major. As a " soldier of 
 fortune " he was vastly more successful. 
 In all the pages of American history, in- 
 deed, it would be difficult to find anybody 
 whose career was more interestingly and 
 picturesquely checkered than was his. 
 
 Lee's purpose in coming to America has 
 never been fully explained. There are 
 concerning this, as every other step of his 
 career, two diametrically opposed opinions. 
 The American historians have for the most 
 agreed in thinking him traitorous and self- 
 seeking, but for my own part I find little 
 to justify this belief, for I have no diffi- 
 culty whatever in accounting for his 
 soldierly vagaries on the score of his 
 temperament, and the peculiar conditions 
 of his early life. A man who, while still 
 
 91 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 a youth, was adopted by the Mohawk In- 
 dians, who bestowed upon him the sig- 
 nificant name of Boiling Water, who 
 was at one time aid-de-camp and intimate 
 friend of the King of Poland, who ren- 
 dered good service in the Russian war 
 against the Turks, all before interesting 
 himself at all in the cause of American 
 freedom, could scarcely be expected to 
 be as simple in his us-ward emotions as an 
 Israel Putnam or a General John Stark 
 might be. 
 
 General Lee arrived in New York from 
 London, on November 10, 1773, his 
 avowed object in seeking the colonies at 
 such a troublous time being to investigate 
 the justice of the American cause. He 
 travelled all over the country in pursuance 
 of facts concerning the fermenting feeling 
 against England, but he was soon able to 
 enroll himself unequivocally upon the side 
 92 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 of the colonies. In a letter written to Lord 
 Percy, then stationed at Boston, this eccen- 
 tric new friend of the American cause 
 himself, it must be remembered, still a 
 half -pay officer in the English army 
 expressed with great freedom his opinion 
 of England's position : " Were the prin- 
 ciple of taxing America without her con- 
 sent admitted, Great Britain would that 
 instant be ruined." And to General Gage, 
 his warm personal friend, Lee wrote : " I 
 am convinced that the court of Tiberius 
 was not more treacherous to the rights of 
 mankind than is the present court of Great 
 Britain." 
 
 It is rather odd to find that General 
 Charles Lee, of whom we know so little, and 
 that little scarcely to his credit, occupied in 
 the military court of the American army a 
 position second only to Washington ; he was 
 appointed a major-general on June 17 ; 
 
 93 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 1775, a date marked for us by the fact that 
 Bunker Hill's battle was then fought. Not 
 long after his arrival at the camp, General 
 Lee, with that tendency to independent ac- 
 tion which was afterward to work to his 
 undoing, took up his quarters in the Royall 
 house. And Lee it was who gave to the 
 fine old place the name Hobgoblin Hall. 
 Erom this mansion, emphatically remote 
 from Lee's command, the eccentric general 
 was summarily recalled by his commander- 
 in-chief, then, as ever after, quick to ad- 
 minister to this major-general what he con- 
 ceived to be needed reproof. 
 
 The house in which General Lee next 
 resided is still standing on Sycamore 
 Street, Somerville. When the place was 
 occupied by Lee it had one of those 
 long pitched roofs, descending to a single 
 story at the back, which are still occa- 
 sionally met with in our interior New 
 94 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 England towns. The house was, however, 
 altered to its present appearance by that 
 John Tufts who occupied it during post- 
 Revolutionary times. From this lofty 
 dwelling, Lee was able to overlook Boston, 
 and to observe, by the aid of a strong field- 
 glass, all the activities of the enemy's camp. 
 
 Lee himself was at this time an object 
 of unfriendly espionage. In a " separate 
 and secret despatch/' Lord Dartmouth in- 
 structed General Gage to have a special 
 eye on the ex-English officer. That Lee 
 had resigned his claim to emolument in 
 the English army does not seem to have 
 made his countrymen as clear as it should 
 have done concerning his relation to their 
 cause. 
 
 Meanwhile, General Lee, though sleep- 
 ing in his wind-swept farmhouse and 
 watching from its windows the movements 
 of the British, indulged when opportunity 
 
 95 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 offered in the social pleasures of the other 
 American officers. Rough and unattrac- 
 tive in appearance, he seems to have been 
 a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac, " a tall 
 man, lank and thin, with a huge nose," 
 he had, when he chose, a certain amount 
 of social grace, and was often extremely 
 entertaining. 
 
 Mrs. John Adams, who first met General 
 Lee at an evening party at Major Mifflin's 
 house in Cambridge, describes him as look- 
 ing like a " careless, hardy veteran," who 
 brought to her mind his namesake, Charles 
 XII. " The elegance of his pen far ex- 
 ceeds that of his person," commented this 
 acute lady. In further describing this 
 evening spent at Major Mifflin's home, in 
 the Brattle mansion, Mrs. Adams writes: 
 " General Lee was very urgent for me to 
 tarry in town, and dine with him and the 
 ladies present, but I excused myself. The 
 96 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 general was determined that I should not 
 only be acquainted with him, but with his 
 companions, too, and therefore placed a 
 chair before me, into which he ordered 
 Mr. Spada (his dog) to mount, and present 
 his paw to me for better acquaintance." 1 
 Lee was very fond indeed of dogs, and 
 was constantly attended by one or more of 
 them, this Spada being a great, shaggy 
 Pomeranian, described by unbiassed critics 
 as looking more like a bear than a harmless 
 canine. In this connection, it is interest- 
 ing to know that Lee has expressed himself 
 very strongly in regard to the affection of 
 men as compared with the affection of 
 dogs. 
 
 This love for dogs was, however, one of 
 the more ornamental of General Lee's 
 traits. His carelessness in regard to his 
 
 * Drake's " Historic Fields and Mansions of Mid- 
 dlesex." Little, Brown & Co., publishers. 
 
 97 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 personal appearance was famous, and not 
 a few amusing stories are told of the awk- 
 ward situations in which this officer's 
 slovenliness involved him. On one of 
 Washington's journeys, in which Lee ac- 
 companied him, the major-general, upon 
 arriving at the house where they were to 
 dine, went straight to the kitchen and de- 
 manded something to eat. The cook, taking 
 him for a servant, told him that she 
 would give him some victuals directly, but 
 that he must first help her off with the pot 
 a request with which he readily com- 
 plied. He was then told to take a bucket 
 and go to the well for water, and was actu- 
 ally engaged in drawing it when found 
 by an aid whom Washington had des- 
 patched in quest of him. The cook was in 
 despair when she heard her assistant ad- 
 dressed by the title of " General." The 
 mug fell from her hands, and dropping 
 98 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 on her knees, she began crying for pardon, 
 when Lee, who was ever ready to see the 
 impropriety of his own conduct, but never 
 willing to change it, gave her a crown, and, 
 turning to the aid-de-camp, observed: 
 " You see, young man, the advantage of a 
 fine coat; the man of consequence is in- 
 debted to it for respect; neither virtue 
 nor ability, without it, will make you look 
 like a gentleman." l 
 
 Perhaps the most remarkable episode in 
 all Lee's social career, was that connected 
 with Sir William Howe's famous entertain- 
 ment at Philadelphia, the Mischianza. 
 This was just after the affair at Monmouth, 
 in the course of which Washington swore, 
 and Lee was taken prisoner. Yet though 
 a prisoner, the eccentric general was 
 treated with the greatest courtesy, and 
 
 1 Drake's " Historic Fields and Mansions of Mid- 
 dlesex." 
 
 99 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 seems even to have received a card for the 
 famous ball. But, never too careful of 
 his personal appearance, he must on this 
 occasion have looked particularly uncouth. 
 Certainly the beautiful Miss Franks, one 
 of the Philadelphia belles, thought him 
 far from ornamental, and, with the keen 
 wit for which she was celebrated, spread 
 abroad a report that General Lee came to 
 the ball clad in green breeches, patched 
 with leather. To prove to her that entire 
 accuracy had not been used in describing 
 his garb at the ball, the general sent the 
 young lady the very articles of clothing 
 which she had criticised ! Naturally, 
 neither the ladies nor their escorts thought 
 any better of Lee's manners after this bit 
 of horse-play, and it is safe to say he was 
 not soon again invited to an evening party. 
 Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Mercy Warren 
 both call Lee " a crabbed man." The latter 
 100 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND 
 
 described him in a letter to Samuel 
 as " plain in his person to a degree of 
 ugliness ; careless even to impoliteness ; 
 his garb ordinary; his voice rough; his 
 manners rather morose; yet sensible, 
 learned, judicious, and penetrating." 
 
 Toward the end of his life, Lee took 
 refuge in an estate which he had pur- 
 chased in Berkeley County, Virginia. 
 Here he lived, more like a hermit than 
 a citizen of the world, or a member of a 
 civilised community. His house was little 
 more than a shell, without partitions, and 
 it lacked even such articles of furniture 
 as were necessary for the most common 
 uses. To a gentleman who visited him 
 in this forlorn retreat, where he found a 
 kitchen in one corner, a bed in another, 
 books in a third, saddles and harness in 
 a fourth, Lee said : " Sir, it is the most 
 convenient and economical establishment 
 
OLE? STEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 ^n; the^ wQrld. The lines of chalk which 
 you see on the floor mark the divisions of 
 the apartments, and I can sit in a corner 
 and give orders and overlook the whole 
 without moving from my chair." 
 
 General Lee died in an obscure inn in 
 Philadelphia, October 2, 1782. His will 
 was characteristic: "I desire most ear- 
 nestly that I may not be buried in any 
 church or churchyard, or Avithin a mile 
 of any Presbyterian or Baptist meeting- 
 house; for since I have resided in this 
 country I have kept so much bad company 
 that I do not choose to continue it when 
 dead." In this will, our singular hero 
 paid a tribute of affectionate remembrance 
 to several of his intimate friends, and of 
 grateful generosity to the humble depend- 
 ents who had adhered to him and minis- 
 
 1 Sparks's " Life of Charles Lee." Little, Brown 
 &Co. 
 
 102 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 tered to his wants in his retirement. The 
 bulk of his property for he was a man 
 of no small means was bequeathed to 
 his only sister, Sydney Lee. to whom he 
 was ever devotedly attached. 
 
 1-53 
 
THE MESSAGE OF THE LANTERNS 
 
 rHERE are many points of view 
 from which this tale of Paul 
 Revere may be told, but to the 
 generality of people the interest of the 
 poem, and of the historical event itself, 
 will always centre around Christ Church, 
 on Salem Street, in the North End of Bos- 
 ton the church where the lanterns were 
 hung out on the night before the battles of 
 Lexington and Concord. At nearly every 
 hour of the day some one may be seen in the 
 now unfrequented street looking up at the 
 edifice's lofty spire with an expression full 
 of reverence and satisfaction. There upon 
 104 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 the venerable structure, imbedded in the 
 solid masonry of the tower front, one reads 
 upon a tablet : 
 
 THE SIGNAL LANTERNS OF 
 
 PAUL REVERE 
 
 DISPLAYED IN THE STEEPLE 
 
 OF THIS CHURCH, 
 
 APRIL 18, 1775, 
 
 WARNED THE COUNTRY OF 
 
 THE MARCH OF TPIE 
 
 BRITISH TROOPS TO LEXINGTON 
 
 AND CONCORD. 
 
 If the pilgrim wishes to get into the 
 very spirit of old Christ Church and its 
 historical associations, he can even climb 
 the tower 
 
 " By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread, 
 To the belfry chamber overhead, 
 And startle the pigeons from their perch 
 On the sombre rafters, that round him make 
 Masses and moving shapes of shade " 
 
 105 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 to look down as Captain John Pulling 
 did that eventful night on 
 
 " The graves on the hill, 
 Lonely and spectral and sombre and still." 
 
 The first time I ever climbed the tower 
 I confess that I was seized with an over- 
 powering sense of the weirdness and mys- 
 tery of those same spectral graves, seen 
 thus from above. It was dark and gloomy 
 going up the stairs, and if John Pulling 
 had thought of the prospect, rather than of 
 his errand, I venture to say he must have 
 been frightened for all his bravery, in that 
 gloomy tower at midnight. 
 
 But, of course, his mind was intent on 
 the work he had to do, and on the signals 
 which would tell how the British were 
 to proceed on their march to seize the rebel 
 stores at Concord. The signals agreed 
 upon were two lanterns if the troops went 
 by way of water, one if they were to go 
 106 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 by land. In Longfellow's story we learn 
 that Pulling 
 
 " Through alley and street, 
 Wanders and watches with eager ears, 
 Till in the silence around him he hears 
 The muster of men at the barrack door, 
 The sound of arms and the tramp of feet, 
 And the measured tread of the grenadiers, 
 Marching down to their boats on the shore." 
 
 It had been decided that the journey 
 should be made by sea ! 
 
 The Province of Massachusetts, it must 
 be understood, was at this time on the 
 eve of open revolt. It had formed an 
 army, commissioned its officers, and 
 promulgated orders as if there were no 
 such person as George III. It was collect- 
 ing stores in anticipation of the moment 
 when its army should take the field. It 
 had, moreover, given General Gage 
 whom the king had sent to Boston to put 
 down the rebellion there to understand 
 
 107 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 that the first movement made by the royal 
 troops into the country would be considered 
 as an act of hostility, and treated as such. 
 Gage had up to this time hesitated to act. 
 At length his resolution to strike a crip- 
 pling blow, and, if possible, to do it with- 
 out bloodshed, was taken. Spies had in- 
 formed him that the patriots' depot of 
 ammunition was at Concord, and he had 
 determined to send a secret expedition to 
 destroy those stores. Meanwhile, however, 
 the patriots were in great doubt as to the 
 time when the definite movement was to 
 be made. 
 
 Fully appreciating the importance of 
 secrecy, General Gage quietly got ready 
 eight hundred picked troops, which he 
 meant to convey under cover of night across 
 the West Bay, and to land on the Cam- 
 bridge side, thus baffling the vigilance of 
 the townspeople, and at the same time con- 
 108 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 siderably shortening the distance his troops 
 would have to march. So much pains was 
 taken to keep the actual destination of 
 these troops a profound secret, that even 
 the officer who was selected for the com- 
 mand only received an order notifying 
 him to hold himself in readiness. 
 
 " The guards in the town were doubled," 
 writes Mr. Drake, " and in order to inter- 
 cept any couriers who might slip through 
 them, at the proper moment mounted 
 patrols were sent out on the roads leading 
 to Concord. Having done what he could 
 to prevent intelligence from reaching the 
 country, and to keep the town quiet, the 
 British general gave his orders for the em- 
 barkation; and at between ten and eleven 
 of the night of April 18, the troops des- 
 tined for this service were taken across the 
 bay in boats to the Cambridge side of the 
 river. A.t this hour, Gage's pickets were 
 
 109 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 guarding the deserted roads leading into 
 the country, and up to this moment no 
 patriot courier had gone out." 
 
 Pulling with his signals and Paul 
 Revere on his swift horse were able, how- 
 ever, to baffle successfully the plans of the 
 British general. The redcoats had scarcely 
 gotten into their boats, when Dawes and 
 Paul Revere started by different roads to 
 warn Hancock and Adams, and the people 
 of the country-side, that the regulars were 
 out. Revere rode by way of Charlestown, 
 and Dawes by the great highroad over the 
 Neck. Revere had hardly got clear of 
 Charlestown when he discovered that he 
 had ridden headlong into the middle of the 
 British patrol ! Being the better mounted, 
 however, he soon distanced his pursuers, 
 and entered Medford, shouting like mad, 
 " Up and arm ! Up and arm ! The regu- 
 lars are out ! The regulars are out ! " 
 110 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 Longfellow has best described the awak- 
 ening of the country-side : 
 
 " A hurry of hoofs in the village street, 
 
 A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, 
 
 And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a 
 
 Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet ; 
 That was all ! And yet, through the gloom and 
 
 the light, 
 
 The fate of a nation was riding that night ; 
 And the spark struck out by that steed, in its 
 
 flight, 
 Kindled the land into flame with its heat." 
 
 The Porter house in Medford, at which 
 Revere stopped long enough to rouse the 
 captain of the Guards, and Avarri him of 
 the approach of the regulars, is now no 
 longer standing, but the Clark place, in 
 Lexington, where the proscribed fellow- 
 patriots, Hancock and Adams, were lodg- 
 ing that night, is still in a good state of 
 preservation. 
 
 The room occupied by " King " Han- 
 Ill 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 cock and " Citizen " Adams is the one on 
 the lower floor, at the left of the entrance. 
 Hancock was at this time visiting this par- 
 ticular house because " Dorothy Q," his 
 fiancee, was just then a guest of the place, 
 and martial pride, coupled, perhaps, with 
 the feeling that he must show himself in 
 the presence of his lady-love a soldier 
 worthy of her favour, inclined him to show 
 fight when he heard from Revere that the 
 regulars were expected. His widow re- 
 lated, in after years, that it was with great 
 difficulty that she and the colonel's aunt 
 kept him from facing the British on the 
 day following the midnight ride. While 
 the bell in the green was sounding the 
 alarm, Hancock was cleaning his sword 
 and his fusee, and putting his accoutre- 
 ments in order. He is said to have been 
 a trifle of a dandy in his military garb, 
 and his points, sword-knot, and lace, were 
 112 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAKD EOOFTEEES 
 
 always of the newest fashion. Perhaps 
 it was the desire to show himself in all 
 his war-paint that made him resist so long 
 the importunities of the ladies, and the 
 urgency of other friends! The astute 
 Adams, it is recounted, was a little an- 
 noyed at his friend's obstinacy, and, clap- 
 ping him on the shoulder, exclaimed, as 
 he looked significantly at the weapons, 
 " That is not our business ; we belong to 
 the cabinet." * 
 
 It was Adams who threw light on the 
 whole situation. Half an hour after Revere 
 reached the house, the other express ar- 
 rived, and the two rebel leaders, being now 
 fully convinced that it was Concord which 
 was the threatened point, hurried the mes- 
 sengers on to the next town, after allowing 
 them barely time to swallow a few mouth- 
 
 1 Drake's " Historic Fields and Mansions of Mid- 
 dlesex." Little, Brown & Co., publishers. 
 
 113 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 fuls of food. Adams did not believe that 
 Gage would send an army merely to take 
 two men prisoners. To him, the true ob- 
 ject of the expedition was very clear. 
 
 Revere, Dawes, and young Doctor Pres- 
 cott, of Concord, who had joined them, had 
 got over half the distance to the next town, 
 when, at a sudden turning, they came upon 
 the second redcoat patrol. Prescott leaped 
 his horse over the roadside wall, and so es- 
 caped across the fields to Concord. Revere 
 and Dawes, at the point of the pistol, gave 
 themselves up. Their business on the road 
 at that hour was demanded by the officer, 
 who was told in return to listen. Then, 
 through the still morning air, the distant 
 booming of the alarm belPs peal on peal 
 was borne to their ears. 
 
 It was the British who were now uneasy. 
 Ordering the prisoners to follow them, the 
 troop rode off at a gallop toward Lexington, 
 114 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 and when they were at the edge of the vil- 
 lage, Revere was told to dismount, and was 
 left to shift for himself. He then ran as 
 fast as his legs could carry him across the 
 pastures back to the Clark parsonage, to 
 report his misadventure, while the patrol 
 galloped off toward Boston to announce 
 theirs. But by this time, the Minute Men 
 of Lexington had rallied to oppose the 
 march of the troops. Thanks to the in- 
 trepidity of Paul Revere, the North End 
 coppersmith, the redcoats, instead of sur- 
 prising the rebels in their beds, found them 
 marshalled on Lexington Green, and at 
 Concord Bridge, in front, flank, and rear, 
 armed and ready to dispute their march to 
 the bitter end. 
 
 " You know the rest. In the books you have read 
 How the British regulars fired and fled 
 How the farmers gave them ball for ball, 
 From behind each fence and farmyard wall, 
 
 115 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 Chasing the redcoats down the lane, 
 Then crossing the fields to emerge again 
 Under the trees at the turn of the road, 
 And only pausing to fire and load. 
 
 " So through the night rode Paul Revere ; 
 
 And so through the night went his cry of alarm 
 
 To every Middlesex village and farm 
 
 A cry of defiance and not of fear, 
 
 A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, 
 
 And a word that shall echo for evermore 1 
 
 For, borne on the night wind of the past, 
 
 Through all our history, to the last, 
 
 The people will waken and listen to hear 
 
 The hurrying hoof beats of that steed, 
 
 And the midnight message of Paul Revere." 1 
 
 1 " Paul Revere's Ride : " Longfellow's Poems. 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers. 
 
 NOTE. Mr. W. B. Clarke, of Boston, has called 
 the writer's attention to a pamphlet entitled : 
 "PAUL REVERE'S SIGNAL. The True Story of 
 
 the Signal Lanterns in Christ Church, Boston. 
 
 By the Rev. John Lee Watson, D. D. New 
 
 York, 1880." 
 
 which seems to offer convincing proof that Cap- 
 tain Pulling, Paul Revere's intimate from boy- 
 hood, and not sexton Robert Newman, as is 
 generally believed, was the "friend" mentioned 
 in Revere's journal, and performed the patriotic 
 office of hanging the lanterns. 
 
 116 
 
HANCOCK'S DOKOTHY Q. 
 
 HE Dorothy Q. of our present 
 interest is not the little maiden 
 of Holmes's charming poem 
 
 
 " Grandmother's mother ; her age I guess, 
 Thirteen summers, or something less ; 
 Girlish bust, but womanly air ; 
 Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair, 
 Lips that lover has never kissed ; 
 Taper fingers and slender wrist ; 
 Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade ; 
 So they painted the little maid. 
 On her hand a parrot green 
 Sits unmoving and broods serene.'* 
 
 but her niece, the Dorothy Q. whom John 
 Hancock loved, and was visiting at Lexing- 
 ton, when Paul Revere warned him of the 
 redcoats' approach. This Dorothy hap- 
 
 117 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 pened to be staying just then with the 
 Reverend Jonas Clark, under the protec- 
 tion of Madam Lydia Hancock, the gov- 
 ernor's aunt. And it was to meet her, his 
 fiancee, that Hancock went, on the eve of 
 the 19th of April, to the house made fa- 
 mous by his visit. 
 
 One imaginative writer has sketched 
 for us the notable group gathered that 
 April night about the time-honoured 
 hearthstone in the modest Lexington par- 
 sonage : " The last rays of the setting sun 
 have left the dampness of the meadows 
 to gather about the home ; and each guest 
 and family occupant has gladly taken seats 
 within the house, while Mrs. Jonas Clark 
 has closed the shutters, added a new fore- 
 log, and fanned the embers to a cheerful 
 flame. The young couple whom Madam 
 Hancock has studiously brought together 
 exchange sympathetic glances as they take 
 118 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND BOOFTEEES 
 
 Congress, appointed to convene at Phila- 
 delphia, May 10, 1775, is contained in a 
 long letter to Miss Quincy. This letter, 
 which gives a rather elaborate account of 
 the dangers and triumphs of the patriot's 
 journey, concludes : " Pray let me hear 
 from you by every Post. God bless you, my 
 dear girl, and believe me most Sincerely , 
 Yours most Affectionately, John Han- 
 cock." 
 
 A month later, June 10, 1775, we find 
 the charming Dorothy Q., now the guest at 
 Fairfield, Connecticut, of Thaddeus Burr, 
 receiving this letter from her lover : 
 
 " MY DEAR DOT.LY : I am almost pre- 
 vail'd on to think that my letters to my 
 Aunt & you are not read, for I cannot ob- 
 tain a reply, I have ask'd million questions 
 & not an answer to one, I beg'd you to let 
 
 120 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETKEES 
 
 me know what things my Aunt wanted & 
 you and many other matters I wanted to 
 know but not one word in answer. I 
 Eeally Take it extreme unkind, pray, my 
 dear, use not so much Ceremony & Re- 
 servedness, why can't you use freedom in 
 writing, be not afraid of me, I want long 
 Letters. I am glad the little things I sent 
 you were agreeable. Why did you not 
 write me of the top of the Umbrella, I 
 am sorry it was spoiled, but I will send you 
 another by my Express which will go in a 
 few days. How did my Aunt like her 
 gown, & let me know if the Stockings 
 suited her; she had better send a pattern 
 shoe & stocking, I warrant I will suit her. 
 ... I Beg, my dear Dolly, you will write 
 me often and long Letters, I will forgive 
 the past if you will mend in future. Do 
 ask my Aunt to make me up and send me 
 
 121 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 a Watch String, and do you make up an- 
 other and send me, I wear them out fast. 
 I want some little thing of jour doing. 
 Kemember me to all my Friends with you, 
 as if named. I ani Call'd upon and must 
 obey. 
 
 " I have sent you by Doctor Church in a 
 paper Box Directed to you, the following 
 things, for your acceptance, & which I do 
 insist you wear, if you do not I shall think 
 the Donor is the objection : 
 
 2 pair white silk ") which stockings 
 
 4 pair white thread ) I think will fit you 
 
 1 pair black satin ~) Shoes, the other, 
 
 1 pair Calem Co. ) Shall be sent when done, 
 
 1 very pretty light hat 
 
 1 neat airy summer Cloak 
 
 2 caps 
 1 Fann 
 
 " I wish these may please you, I shall be 
 gratified if they do, pray write me, I will 
 attend to all your Commands., 
 122 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 " Adieu, my dear Girl, and believe me 
 with, great Esteem & affection, 
 
 " Yours without reserve, 
 
 " JOHN HANCOCK." 1 
 
 It is interesting to know that while Miss 
 Quincy was a guest in Fair field, Aaron 
 Burr, the nephew of her host, came to the 
 house, and that his magnetic influence 
 soon had an' effect upon the beautiful young 
 lady. But watchful Aunt Lydia prevented 
 the charmer from thwarting the Hancock 
 family plans, and on the 28th day of 
 the following August there was a great 
 wedding at Fairfield. John Hancock, 
 president of the Continental Congress, and 
 Miss Dorothy Quincy were joined in mar- 
 riage in style befitting the family situa- 
 tions. 
 
 The noted couple went at once to Phila- 
 
 l New England Magazine. 
 
 123 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 delphia, where the patriot lived at inter- 
 vals during the remainder of the session. 
 Mrs. Hancock seems to have been much of 
 the time in Boston, however, and occa- 
 sionally, in the course of the next few 
 years, we catch delightful glimpses through 
 her husband's letters of his great affection 
 for her, and for their little one. 
 
 Under date of Philadelphia, March 10, 
 1777, we read: " I shall make out as well 
 as I can, but I assure you, my Dear Soul, 
 I long to have you here, & I know you will 
 be as expeditious as you can in coming. 
 When I part from you again it must be 
 a very extraordinary occasion. I have sent 
 everywhere to get a gold or silver rattle 
 for the child with a coral to send, but can- 
 not get one. I will have one if possible on 
 your coming. I have sent a sash for her 
 & two little papers of pins for you. If you 
 do not want them you can give them away. 
 124 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 . . . May every blessing of an Indulgent 
 Providence attend you. I most sincerely 
 wish you a good journey & hope I shall 
 soon have the happiness of seeing you with 
 the utmost affection and Love. My dear 
 Dolly, I am yours forever, 
 
 " JOHN HANCOCK." 
 
 After two years and a half of enforced 
 absence, the President of the Continental 
 Congress returned home to that beautiful 
 house on Beacon Street, which was unfor- 
 tunately destroyed in 1863, to make room 
 for a more modern building. Here the 
 united couple lived very happily with their 
 two children, Lydia and Washington. 
 
 Judging by descriptions that have come 
 down to us, and by the World's Fair repro- 
 duction of the Hancock House, their man- 
 sion must have been a very sumptuous one. 
 It was built of stone, after the manner 
 
 125 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 favoured by Bostonians who could afford 
 it, with massive walls, and a balcony pro- 
 jecting over the entrance door, upon which 
 a large second-story window opened. 
 Braintree stone ornamented the corners 
 and window-places, and the tiled roof was 
 surrounded by. a balustrade. From the 
 roof, dormer windows provided a beautiful 
 view of the surrounding country. The 
 grounds were enclosed by a low stone wall, 
 on which was placed a light wooden fence. 
 The house itself was a little distance back 
 from the street, and the approach was by 
 means of a dozen stone steps and a care- 
 fully paved walk. 
 
 At the right of the entrance was a recep- 
 tion-room of spacious dimensions, provided 
 with furniture of bird's-eye maple, covered 
 with rich damask. Out of this opened 
 the dining-room, sixty feet in length, in 
 which Hancock was wont to entertain. 
 126 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 Opposite was a smaller apartment, the 
 usual dining-room of the family. Next 
 adjoining were the china-room and offices, 
 while behind were to be found the coach- 
 house and barn of the estate. 
 
 The family drawing-room, its lofty walls 
 covered with crimson paper, was at the 
 left of the entrance. The upper and lower 
 halls of the house were hung with pictures 
 of game and with hunting scenes. The 
 furniture, wall-papers and draperies 
 throughout the house had been imported 
 from England by Thomas Hancock, and 
 expressed the height of luxury for that day. 
 Passing through the hall, a flight of steps 
 led to a small summer-house in the garden, 
 near Mount Vernon Street, and here the 
 grounds were laid out in ornamental box- 
 bordered beds like those still to be seen 
 in the beautiful Washington home on the 
 Potomac. A highly interesting corner 
 
 127 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETEEEib 
 
 of the garden was that given over to the 
 group of mulberry-trees, which had been 
 imported from England by Thomas Han- 
 cock, the uncle of John, he being, with 
 others of his time, immensely interested 
 in the culture of the silkworm. 
 
 Of this beautiful home Dorothy Quincy 
 showed herself well fitted to be mistress, 
 and through her native grace and dignity 
 admirably performed her part at the re- 
 ception of D'Estaing, Lafayette, Washing- 
 ton, Brissot, Lords Stanley and Wortley, 
 and other noted guests. 
 
 On October 8, 1793, Hancock died, at 
 the age of fifty-six years. The last re- 
 corded letter penned in his letter volume 
 was to Captain James Scott, his lifelong 
 friend. And it was to this Captain Scott 
 that our Dorothy Q. gave her hand in a 
 second marriage three years later. She 
 outlived her second husband many years, 
 128 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 residing at the end of her life on Federal 
 Street in Boston. When turned of seventy 
 she had a lithe, handsome figure, a pair of 
 laughing eyes, and fine yellow ringlets in 
 which scarcely a gray hair could be seen. 
 And although for the second time a widow, 
 she was as sprightly as a girl of sixteen. 
 In her advanced years, Madam Scott re- 
 ceived another call from Lafayette, and 
 those who witnessed the hearty interview 
 say that the once youthful chevalier and the 
 unrivalled belle met as if only a summer 
 had passed since their social intercourse 
 during the perils of the Revolution. 
 
 129 
 
BAEONESS EIEDESEL AND HER 
 TOEY FEIENDS 
 
 rHE most beautiful example of 
 wifely devotion to be found in the 
 annals connected with the war of 
 the Revolution is that afforded by the story 
 of the lovely Baroness Eiedesel, whose 
 husband was deputed to serve at the head 
 of the German mercenaries allied to the 
 king's troops, and who was herself, with 
 the baron and her children, made prisoner 
 of war after the battle of Saratoga. 
 
 Eiedesel was a gallant soldier, and his 
 wife a fair and fascinating young woman 
 at this time. They had not been long mar- 
 ried when the war in America broke out, 
 130 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETEEES 
 
 and the wife's love for her husband was 
 such as to impel her to dare all the hard- 
 ships of the journey and join him in the 
 foreign land. Her letters and journal, 
 which give a lively and vivid account of 
 the perils of this undertaking, and of the 
 pleasures and difficulties that she expe- 
 rienced after she had succeeded in reaching 
 her dear spouse, supply what is perhaps 
 the most interesting human document of 
 those long years of war. 
 
 The baroness landed on the American 
 continent at Quebec, and travelled amid 
 great hardships to Chambly, where her 
 husband was stationed. For two days 
 only they were together. After that she 
 returned with her children to Three Rivers. 
 Soon, however, came the orders to march 
 down into the enemy's country. 
 
 The description of this journey as the 
 badness has given it to us makes, indeed, 
 
 131 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 moving reading. Once a frightful cannon- 
 ade was directed against the house in 
 which the women and the wounded had 
 taken refuge. In the cellar of this place 
 Madam Riedesel and her children passed 
 the entire night. It was in this cellar, 
 indeed, that the little family lived during 
 the long period of waiting that preceded 
 the capitulation made necessary by Bur- 
 goyne's inexcusable delay near Saratoga. 
 Later the Riedesels were most hospitably 
 entertained at Saratoga by General Schuy- 
 ler, his wife and daughters, of whom the 
 baroness never fails to speak in her journal 
 with the utmost affection. 
 
 The journey from Albany to Boston was 
 full of incident and hardship, but of it 
 the plucky wife writes only : " In the 
 midst of all my trials God so supported 
 me that I lost neither my frolicsomeness 
 nor my spirits. . . ." The contrast be- 
 
 132 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 tween the station of the Americans and of 
 the Germans who were their prisoners, is 
 strikingly brought out in this passage of 
 the diary : " Some of the American gen- 
 erals who were in charge of us on the 
 march to Boston were shoemakers; and 
 upon our halting days they made boots for 
 our officers, and also mended nicely the 
 shoes of our soldiers. They set a great 
 value upon our money coinage, which with 
 them was scarce. One of our officers had 
 worn his boots entirely into shreds. He 
 saw that an American general had on a 
 good pair, and said to him, jestingly, i I 
 will gladly give you a guinea for them.' 
 Immediately the general alighted from his 
 horse, took the guinea, gave up his boots, 
 put on the badly-worn ones of the officer, 
 and again mounted his horse." 
 
 The journey was at length successfully 
 accomplished, however, and in Massachu- 
 
 133 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 setts the baroness was on the whole very 
 well treated, it would seem. 
 
 " We remained three weeks in wretched 
 quarters at Winter Hill," she writes, 
 " until they transferred us to Cambridge, 
 where they lodged us in one of the most 
 beautiful houses of the place, which had 
 formerly been built by the wealth of the 
 royalists. Never had I chanced upon any 
 such agreeable situation. Seven families, 
 who were connected with each other partly 
 by the ties of relationship and partly by 
 affection, had here farms, gardens, and 
 magnificent houses, and not far off planta- 
 tions of fruit. The owners of these were 
 in the habit of meeting each other in the 
 afternoon, now at the bouse of one, and now 
 at another, and making themselves merry 
 with music and the dance living in 
 prosperity united and happy, until, alas! 
 this ruinous war severed them, and left 
 134 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 all their houses desolate except two, the 
 proprietors of which were also soon obliged 
 to flee. . . . 
 
 " None of our gentlemen were allowed 
 to go into Boston. Curiosity and desire 
 urged me, however, to pay a visit to Madam 
 Carter, the daughter of General Schuyler, 
 and I dined at her house several times. 
 The city throughout is pretty, but inhab- 
 ited by violent patriots, and full of wicked 
 people. The women especially were so 
 shameless, that they regarded me with re- 
 pugnance, and even spit at me when I 
 passed by them. Madam Carter was as 
 gentle and good as her parents, but her 
 husband was wicked and treacherous. She 
 came often to visit us, and also dined at 
 our house with the other generals. We 
 sought to show them by every means our 
 gratitude. They seemed also to have much 
 friendship for us; and yet at the same 
 
 135 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 time this miserable Carter, when the 
 English General Howe had burned many 
 hamlets and small towns, made the hor- 
 rible proposition to the Americans to chop 
 off the heads of our generals, salt them 
 down in small barrels, and send over to 
 the English one of these barrels for every 
 hamlet or little town burned down. But 
 this barbarous suggestion fortunately was 
 not adopted. 
 
 " . . . I saw here that nothing is more 
 terrible than a civil war. Almost every 
 family was disunited. . . . On the third 
 of June, 1778, I gave a ball and supper 
 in celebration of the birthday of my hus- 
 band. I had invited to it all the generals 
 and officers. The Carters also were there. 
 General Burgoyne sent an excuse after he 
 had made us wait until eight o'clock in the 
 evening. He invariably excused himself 
 on various pretences from coming to see 
 136 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 us until his departure for England, when 
 he came and made me a great many apolo- 
 gies, but to which I made no other answer 
 than that I should be extremely sorry if 
 he had gone out of his way on our account. 
 We danced considerably, and our cook pre- 
 pared us a magnificent supper of more 
 than eighty covers. Moreover, our court- 
 yard and garden were illuminated. As the 
 birthday of the King of England came 
 upon the following day, which was the 
 fourth, it was resolved that we would not 
 separate until his health had been drank; 
 which was done with the most hearty 
 attachment to his person and his interests. 
 " Never, I believe, has ' God Save the 
 King/ been drunk with more enthusiasm 
 or more genuine good will. Even both 
 my oldest little daughters were there, hav- 
 ing stayed up to see the illumination. All 
 eyes were full of tears ; and it seemed as 
 
 137 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 if every one present was proud to have 
 the spirit to venture to this in the midst 
 of our enemies. Even the Carters could 
 not shut their hearts against us. As soon 
 as the company separated, we perceived 
 that the whole house was surrounded by 
 Americans, who, having seen so many peo- 
 ple go into the house, and having noticed 
 also the illumination, suspected that we 
 were planning a mutiny, and if the slight- 
 est disturbance had arisen it would have 
 cost us dear. . . . 
 
 " The Americans," says the baroness, 
 further on, " when they desire to collect 
 their troops together, place burning torches 
 of pitch upon the hilltops, at which signal 
 every one hastens to the rendezvous. We 
 were once witnesses of this when General 
 Howe attemped a landing at Boston in 
 order to rescue the captive troops. They 
 learned of this plan, as usual, long before- 
 138 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 hand, and opened barrels of pitch, where- 
 upon for three or four successive days a 
 large number of people without shoes and 
 stockings, and with guns 011 their backs, 
 were seen hastily coming from all direc- 
 tions, by which means so many people 
 came together so soon that it would have 
 been a very difficult thing to effect a 
 landing. 
 
 " We lived very happily and contented 
 in Cambridge, and were therefore well 
 pleased at remaining there during the 
 captivity of our troops. As winter ap- 
 proached, however, we were ordered to 
 Virginia [because of the difficulty of pro- 
 viding provisions], and in the month of 
 November, 1778, set out. 
 
 " My husband, fortunately, found a 
 pretty English wagon, and bought it for 
 me, so that as before I was enabled to 
 travel comfortably. My little Gustava 
 
 139 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 had entreated one of my husband's adju- 
 tants, Captain Edmonston, not to leave us 
 on the way. The confiding manner of the 
 child touched him and he gave his promise 
 and faithfully kept it. I travelled always 
 with the army and often over almost im- 
 passable roads. . . . 
 
 " I had always provisions with me, but 
 carried them in a second small wagon. As 
 this could not go as fast as we, I was often 
 in want of everything. Once when we 
 were passing a town called Hertford 
 [Hartford, Connecticut], we made a halt, 
 which, by the by, happened every fourth 
 day. We there met General Lafayette, 
 whom my husband invited to dinner, as 
 otherwise he would have been unable to 
 find anything to eat. This placed me in 
 rather an awkward dilemma as I knew 
 that he loved a good dinner. Finally, 
 however, I managed to glean from what 
 140 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETEEES 
 
 provisions I had on hand enough to make 
 him a very respectable meal. He was so 
 polite and agreeable that he pleased us all 
 very much. He had many Americans in 
 his train, though, who were ready to leap 
 out of their skins for vexation at hearing 
 us speak constantly in French. Perhaps 
 they feared, on seeing us on such a friendly 
 footing with him, that we would be able 
 to alienate him from their cause, or that 
 he would confide things to us that we ought 
 not to know. 
 
 " Lafayette spoke much of England, 
 and of the kindness of the king in having 
 had all objects of interest shown to him. 
 I could not keep myself from asking him 
 how he could find it in his heart to accept 
 so many marks of kindness from the king 
 when he was on the point of departing in 
 order to fight against him. Upon this ob- 
 servation of mine he appeared somewhat 
 
 141 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 ashamed, and aaiswered me : i It is true 
 that such a thought passed through my 
 mind one day, when the king offered to 
 show me his fleet. I answered that I hoped 
 to see it some day, and then quietly retired, 
 in order to escape from the embarrassment 
 of being obliged to decline, point blank, 
 the offer, should it be repeated.' " 
 
 The baroness's own meeting with the 
 king soon after her return to England, 
 in the autumn of 1780, when the prisoners 
 were exchanged, is thus entertainingly 
 described : " One day when we were yet 
 seated at table, the queen's first lady of 
 honour, my Lady Howard, sent us a mes- 
 sage to the effect that her Majesty would 
 receive us at six o'clock that afternoon. 
 As my court dress was not yet ready, and 
 I had nothing with me proper to wear, 
 I sent my apologies for not going at that 
 time, which I again repeated when we had 
 142 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 the honour of being presented to their Maj- 
 esties, who were both present at the recep- 
 tion. The queen, however, as did also the 
 king, received us with extraordinary gra- 
 ciousness, and replied to my excuses by 
 saying, ' We do not look at the dress of 
 those persons we are glad to see.' 
 
 " They were surrounded by the prin- 
 cesses, their daughters. We seated our- 
 selves before the chimney-fire, the 
 queen, the princesses, the first lady of 
 honour, and myself, forming a half- 
 circle, my husband, with the king, stand- 
 ing in the centre close to the fire. Tea 
 and cakes were then passed round. I sat 
 between the queen and one of the prin- 
 cesses, and was obliged to go over a great 
 part of my adventures. Her majesty said 
 to me very graciously, ' I have followed 
 you everywhere, and have often inquired 
 after you ; and I have always heard with 
 
 143 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 delight that you were well, contented, and 
 beloved by every one.' I happened to have 
 at this time a shocking cough. Observing 
 this, the Princess Sophia went herself and 
 brought me a jelly made of black currants, 
 which she represented as a particularly 
 good remedy, and forced me to accept a 
 jar full. 
 
 " About nine o'clock in the evening the 
 Prince of Wales came in. His youngest 
 sisters nocked around him, and he em- 
 braced them and danced them around. 
 In short, the royal family had such a pecul- 
 iar gift for removing all restraint that 
 one could readily imagine himself to be 
 in a cheerful family circle of his own 
 station in life. We remained with them 
 until ten o'clock, and the king conversed 
 much with my husband about America in 
 German, which he spoke exceedingly well." 
 
 From England the baroness proceeded 
 144 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 (in 1783), to her home in Brunswick, 
 where she was joyfully received, and 
 where, after her husband's triumph, they 
 enjoyed together respite from war for a 
 period of four years. In 1794, General 
 Riedesel was appointed commandant of 
 the city of Brunswick, where he died in 
 1800. The haroness survived him eight 
 years, passing away in Berlin, March 29, 
 1808, at the age of sixty-two. She rests 
 beside her beloved consort in the family 
 vault at Lauterbach. 
 
 Her Cambridge residence, which for- 
 merly stood at the corner of Sparks Street, 
 on Brattle, among the beautiful lindens 
 so often mentioned in the " journal," has 
 recently been remodelled and removed to 
 the next lot but one from its original site. 
 It now looks as in the picture, and is 
 numbered 149 Brattle Street. A little 
 street at the right has been appropriately 
 
 145 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 named Riedesel Avenue. Yet even in his- 
 tory-loving Cambridge there is little famil- 
 iarity with the career of the baron and his 
 charming lady, and there are few persons 
 who have read the entertaining journal, 
 written in German a century and a quarter 
 ago by this clever and devoted wife. 
 
 146 
 
DOCTOR CHTJKCH: FIRST TRAI- 
 TOR TO THE AMERICAN CAUSE 
 
 y~T~ERY few old houses retain at the 
 y present time so large a share 
 of the dignity and picturesque- 
 ness originally theirs, as does the home- 
 stead whose chief interest for us lies in the 
 fact that it was the Revolutionary prison 
 of Doctor Benjamin Church, the first-dis- 
 covered traitor to the American cause. 
 This house is on Brattle Street, at the 
 corner of Hawthorn. Built about 1700, 
 it came early into the possession of Jona- 
 than Belcher, who afterward became Sir 
 Jonathan, and from 1730 till 1741 was 
 
 147 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 governor of Massachusetts and New 
 Hampshire. Colonel John Vassall the 
 elder was the next owner of the house, ac- 
 quiring it in 1736, and somewhat later 
 conveying it, with its adjoining estate of 
 seven acres, to his brother, Major Henry, 
 an officer in the militia, who died under its 
 roof in 1769. 
 
 Major Henry Vassall had married Pen- 
 elope, sister of Isaac Royall, the proprietor 
 of the beautiful place at Medford, but 
 upon the beginning of hostilities, this 
 sprightly widow abandoned her spacious 
 home in such haste that she carried along 
 with her, according to tradition, a young 
 companion whom she had not time to 
 restore to her friends ! Such of her prop- 
 erty as could be used by the colony forces 
 was given in charge of Colonel Stark, 
 while the rest was allowed to pass into 
 Boston. The barns and roomy outbuild- 
 148 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 ings were used for the storage of the 
 colony forage. 
 
 It is highly probable that the Widow 
 Vassal!' s house at once became the Amer- 
 ican hospital, and that it was the resi- 
 dence, as it was certainly the prison, of 
 Doctor Benjamin Church. Church had 
 been placed at the head of an army hospi- 
 tal for the accommodation of twenty thou- 
 sand men, and till this time had seemed 
 a brave and zealous compatriot of Warren 
 and the other leading men of the time. 
 Soon after his appointment, he was, how- 
 ever, detected in secret correspondence with 
 Gage. He had entrusted to a woman of 
 his acquaintance a letter written in cipher 
 to be forwarded to the British commander. 
 This letter was found upon the girl, she 
 was taken to headquarters, and there the 
 contents of the fatal message were de- 
 ciphered and the defection of Doctor 
 
 149 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 Church established. When questioned by 
 Washington he appeared utterly con- 
 founded, and made no attempt to vindicate 
 himself. 
 
 The letter itself did not contain any 
 intelligence of importance, but the dis- 
 covery that one, until then so high in the 
 esteem of his countrymen, was engaged in 
 a clandestine correspondence with the 
 enemy was deemed sufficient evidence of 
 guilt. Church was therefore arrested at 
 once, and confined in a chamber looking 
 upon Brattle Street. Some of his leisure, 
 while here imprisoned, he employed in 
 cutting on the door of a closet : 
 
 "B CHURCH, JR." 
 
 There the marks still remain, their sig- 
 nificance having after a half century been 
 interpreted by a lady of the house to whom 
 150 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 they had long been familiar, but who had 
 lacked any clue to their origin until, in 
 the course of a private investigation, she 
 determined beyond a doubt their relation 
 to Church. The chamber has two windows 
 in the north front, and two overlooking the 
 area on the south. 
 
 Church's fall was the more terrible be- 
 cause from a height. He was a member 
 of a very distinguished family, and he had 
 been afforded in his youth all the best 
 opportunities of the day. In 1754 he was 
 graduated at Harvard, and after studying 
 with Doctor Pynchon rose to considerable 
 eminence as a physician and particularly 
 as a surgeon. Besides talents and genius 
 of a sort, he was endowed with a rare 
 poetic fancy, many of his verses being full 
 of daintiness as well as of a very pretty 
 wit. He was, however, somewhat extrava- 
 gant in his habits, and about 1768 had 
 
 151 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 built himself an elegant country house 
 near Boston. It was to sustain this, it is 
 believed, that he sold himself to the king's 
 cause. 
 
 To all appearance, however, Church was 
 up to the very hour of his detection one 
 of the leading patriots of the time. He 
 had been chosen to deliver the oration in 
 the Old South Meeting-House on March 5, 
 IT 7 3, and he there pronounced a stirring 
 discourse, which has still power to thrill 
 the reader, upon the massacre the day cele- 
 brates, and the love of liberty which 
 inspired the patriots' revolt on that memo- 
 rable occasion. Yet two years earlier, as 
 we have since discovered from a letter of 
 Governor Hutchinson, he had been anony- 
 mously employing his venal pen in the 
 service of the government! 
 
 In 1774, when he was a member of the 
 Provincial Congress, he was first suspected 
 152 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 of communication with Gage, and of re- 
 ceiving a reward for his treachery. Paul 
 Revere has written concerning this : " In 
 the fall of "74 and the winter of '75 I 
 was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly 
 mechanics, who formed themselves into a 
 committee for the purpose of watching the 
 movements of the British soldiers and 
 gaining every intelligence of the Tories. 
 We held our meetings at the Green Dragon 
 Tavern. This committee were astonished 
 to find all their secrets known to General 
 Gage, although every time they met every 
 member swore not to reveal any of their 
 transactions except to Hancock, Adams, 
 Warren, Otis, Church, and one or two 
 others." 
 
 The traitor, of course, proved to be 
 Doctor Church. One of his students who 
 kept his books and knew of his money 
 embarrassment first mistrusted him. Only 
 
 153 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 treachery, he felt, could account for his 
 master's sudden acquisition of some hun- 
 dreds of new British guineas. 
 
 The doctor was called before a council 
 of war consisting of all the major-generals 
 and brigadiers of the army, beside the 
 adjutant-general, Washington himself 
 presiding. This tribunal decided that 
 Church's acts had been criminal, but re- 
 manded him for the decision of the General 
 Court, of which he was a member. He was 
 taken in a chaise, escorted by General 
 Gates and a guard of twenty men, to the 
 music of fife and drum, to Watertown 
 meeting-house, where the court sat. " The 
 galleries," says an old writer, " were 
 thronged with people of all ranks. The 
 bar was placed in the middle of the broad 
 aisle, and the doctor arraigned." His de- 
 fence at the trial was very ingenious and 
 able : that the fatal letter was designed 
 154 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 for his brother, but that since it was not 
 sent he had communicated no intelligence ; 
 that there was nothing in the letter but 
 notorious facts; that his exaggerations of 
 the American force could only be designed 
 to favour the cause of his country; and 
 that his object was purely patriotic. He 
 added, in a burst of sounding though un- 
 convincing oratory : " The warmest bosom 
 here does not flame with a brighter zeal 
 for the security, happiness, and liberties of 
 America than mine." 
 
 These eloquent professions did not avail 
 him, however. He was adjudged guilty, 
 and expelled from the House of Repre- 
 sentatives of Massachusetts. By order of 
 the General Congress, he was condemned 
 to close confinement in Norwich jail in 
 Connecticiit, " and debarred from the use 
 of pen, ink, and paper," but his health 
 failing, he was allowed (in 1776) to leave 
 
 155 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 the country. He sailed for the West 
 Indies, and the vessel that bore him 
 was never afterward heard from. 
 
 Some people in Church's time, as well 
 as our own, have been disposed to doubt 
 the man's treachery, but Paul Revere was 
 firmly convinced that the doctor was in 
 the pay of General Gage. Revere's state- 
 ment runs in part as follows : 
 
 " The same day I met Doctor Warren. 
 He was president of the Committee of 
 Safety. He engaged me as a messenger 
 to do the out-of-doors business for that 
 committee ; which gave me an opportunity 
 of being frequently with them. The Fri- 
 day evening after, about sunset, I was 
 sitting with some or near all that com- 
 mittee in their room, which was at Mr. 
 Hastings's house in Cambridge. Doctor 
 Church all at once started up. 'Doctor 
 
 156 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Warren/ said he, ' I am determined to go 
 into Boston to-morrow.' (It set them all 
 a-staring. ) Doctor Warren replied, ' Are 
 you serious, Doctor Church ? They will 
 hang you if they catch you in Boston.' 
 He replied, ' I am serious, and am deter- 
 mined to go at all adventures.' After a 
 considerable conversation, Doctor Warren 
 said, ' If you are determined, let us make 
 some business for you.' They agreed that 
 he should go to get medicine for their and 
 our wounded officers." 
 
 Naturally, Paul Revere, who was an 
 ardent patriot as well as an exceedingly 
 straightforward man, had little sympathy 
 with Church's weakness, but to-day as one 
 looks at the initials scratched by the pris- 
 oner on the door of his cell, one's heart 
 expands with pity for the man, and one 
 wonders long and long whether the vessel 
 
 157 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 on which he sailed was really lost, or 
 whether he escaped on it to foreign shores, 
 there to expiate as best he could his sin 
 against himself and his country. 
 
 158 
 
A VICTIM OF TWO REVOLUTIONS 
 
 /N the life of Colonel James Swan, as 
 in that of Doctor Benjamin Church, 
 money was the root of all evil. Swan 
 was almost a fool because of his pig-head- 
 edness in financial adversity, and Church 
 was ever a knave, plausible even when 
 proved guilty. Yet both fell from the 
 same cause, utter inability to keep money 
 and avoid debt. 
 
 Colonel Swan's history reads very like 
 a romance. He was born in Fifeshire, 
 Scotland, in 1754, and carne to America 
 in 1765. He found employment in Bos- 
 ton, and devoted all his spare time to 
 books. While a clerk of eighteen, in a 
 
 159 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 counting-house near Eaneuil Hall ; he pub- 
 lished a work on the African slave trade, 
 entitled, " A Discussion of Great Britain 
 and Her Colonies from the Slave Trade," 
 a copy of which, preserved in the Boston 
 Public Library, is well worth reading for 
 its flavour and wit. 
 
 While serving an apprenticeship with 
 Thaxter & Son, he formed an intimate 
 friendship with several other clerks who, 
 in after years, became widely known, 
 among them, Benjamin Thompson, after- 
 ward made Count Rumford, and Henry 
 Knox, who later became the bookseller on 
 Cornhill, and finally a general in the Con- 
 tinental army. 
 
 Swan was a member of the Sons of Lib- 
 erty, and took part in the famous Boston 
 tea-party. He was engaged in the battle 
 of Bunker Hill as a volunteer aid of War- 
 ren, and was twice wounded. He also 
 160 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 witnessed the evacuation of Boston by the 
 British, March 17, 1776. He later be- 
 came secretary of the Massachusetts board 
 of war, and was elected a member of the 
 legislature. Throughout the whole war 
 he occupied positions of trust, often re- 
 quiring great courage and cool judgment, 
 and the fidelity with which every duty was 
 performed was shown by the honours con- 
 ferred upon him after retiring to civil 
 life. By means of a large fortune which 
 fell to him, he entered mercantile business 
 on a large scale, and became very wealthy. 
 He owned large tracts of land in different 
 parts of the country, and bought much of 
 the confiscated property of the Tories, 
 among other lands the estate belonging to 
 Governor Hutchinson, lying on Tremont 
 Street, between West and Boylston Streets. 
 His large speculations, however, caused 
 him to become deeply involved in debt. 
 
 161 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 In 1787, accordingly, he started out anew 
 to make a fortune, and through the in- 
 fluence of Lafayette and other men of 
 prominence in Paris, he secured many 
 government contracts which entailed im- 
 mense profit. Through all the dark days 
 of the French Revolution, he tried to serve 
 the cause of the proscribed French nobility 
 by perfecting plans for them to colonise 
 on his lands in America. A large number 
 he induced to immigrate, and a vast quan- 
 tity of the furniture and belongings of 
 these unfortunates was received on board 
 his ships. But before the owners could 
 follow their furniture, the axe had fallen 
 upon their heads. 
 
 When the Reign of Terror was at its 
 height, the Sally, owned by Colonel Swan, 
 and commanded by Captain Stephen 
 Clough, of Wiscasset, Maine, came home 
 with a strange cargo and a stranger story. 
 162 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 The cargo consisted of French tapestries, 
 marquetry, silver with foreign crests, rare 
 vases, clocks, costly furniture, and no end 
 of apparelling fit for a queen. The story 
 was that, only for the failure at the last 
 moment of a plot for her deliverance, 
 Marie Antoinette would also have been on 
 the sloop, the plan being that she should 
 be the guest at Wiscasset of the captain's 
 wife until she could be transferred to a 
 safer retreat. 
 
 However true may be the rumour of a 
 plot to bring Marie Antoinette to America, 
 it is certain that the furniture brought on 
 the Sally, was of exceptional value and 
 beauty. It found its resting-place in the 
 old Swan house of our picture, to which 
 it gave for many years the name of the 
 Marie Antoinette house. One room was 
 even called the Marie Antoinette room, 
 and the bedstead of this apartment, which 
 
 163 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 is to-day in the possession of the descend- 
 ants of Colonel Swan, is still known as the 
 Marie Antoinette bedstead. Whether the 
 unhappy queen ever really rested on this 
 bed cannot, of course, be said, but tradition 
 has it that it was designed for her use in 
 America because she had found it com- 
 fortable in France. 
 
 Colonel Swan, having paid all his debts, 
 returned in 1795 to the United States, 
 accompanied by the beautiful and eccentric 
 gentlewoman who was his wife, and who 
 had been with her husband in Paris during 
 the Terror. They brought with them on 
 this occasion a very large collection of fine 
 French furniture, decorations, and paint- 
 ings. The colonel had become very 
 wealthy indeed through his commercial 
 enterprises, and was now able to spend a 
 great deal of money upon his fine Dorches- 
 ter mansion, which he finished about the 
 164 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 year 1796. A prominent figure of the 
 house was the circular dining-hall, thirty- 
 two feet in diameter, crowned at the height 
 of perhaps twenty-five feet by a dome, 
 and having three mirror windows. As 
 originally built, it contained no fireplaces 
 or heating conveniences of any kind. 
 
 Mrs. Swan accompanied her husband 
 on several subsequent trips to Paris, and 
 it was on one of these occasions that the 
 colonel came to great grief. He had con- 
 tracted, it is said, a debt claimed in France 
 to be two million francs. This indebted- 
 ness he denied, and in spite of the per- 
 suasion of his friends he would make no 
 concession in the matter. As a matter of 
 principle he would not pay a debt which, 
 he insisted, he did not owe. He seems 
 to have believed the claim of his creditor 
 to be a plot, and he at once resolved to be 
 a martyr. He was thereupon arrested, and 
 
 165 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 confined in St. Pelagie, a debtor's prison, 
 from 1808 to 1830, a period of twenty-two 
 years ! 
 
 He steadfastly denied the charge against 
 him, and, although able to settle the debt, 
 preferred to remain a prisoner to securing 
 his liberty on an unjust plea. . . . He 
 gave up his wife, children, friends, and the 
 comforts of his Parisian and New England 
 homes for a principle, and made prepara- 
 tions for a long stay in prison. Lafayette, 
 Swan's sincere friend, tried in vain to pre- 
 vail upon him to take his liberty. 1 
 
 Doctor Small, his biographer, tells us 
 that he lived in a little cell in the prison, 
 and was treated with great respect by the 
 other prisoners, they putting aside their 
 little furnaces with which they cooked, that 
 he might have more room for exercise. 
 Not a day passed without some kind act 
 
 i History of Swan's Island." 
 166 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 on his part, and he was known to have been 
 the cause of the liberation of many poor 
 debtors. When the jailor introduced his 
 pretended creditor, he would politely salute 
 him, and say to the former : " My friend, 
 return me to my chamber." 
 
 With funds sent by his wife, Swan hired 
 apartments in the Rue de la Clif, opposite 
 St. Pelagie, which he caused to be fitted 
 up at great expense. Here were dining 
 and drawing rooms, coaches, and stables, 
 and outhouses., and here he invited his 
 guests and lodged his servants, putting at 
 the disposal of the former his carriages, 
 in which they drove to the promenade, 
 the ball, the theatre everywhere in his 
 name. At this Parisian home he gave 
 great dinners to his constant but bewil- 
 dered friends. He seemed happy in thus 
 braving his creditors and judges, we are 
 told, allowed his beard to grow, dressed 
 
 167 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 a la mode, and was cheerful to the last day 
 of his confinement. 
 
 His wife died in 1825, and five years 
 later the Kevolution of July threw open his 
 doors in the very last hour of his twenty- 
 second year of captivity. His one desire 
 upon being released was to embrace his 
 friend Lafayette, and this he did on the 
 steps of the Hotel de Ville. Then he re- 
 turned, July 31, to reinstate himself 
 in prison for St. Pelagie had after 
 twenty-two years come to stand to him for 
 home. He was seized almost immediately 
 upon his second entrance into confinement 
 with a hemorrhage, and died suddenly in 
 the Kue d'Echiquier, aged seventy-six. In 
 his will, he donated large sums of money 
 to his four children, and to the city of 
 Boston to found an institution to be called 
 the Swan Orphan Academy. But the 
 estate was found to be hopelessly insolvent, 
 168 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 and the public legacy was never paid. 
 The colonel's name lives, however, in the 
 Maine island he purchased in 1786, for the 
 purpose of improving and settling, a 
 project which, but for one of his periodic 
 failures, he would probably have success- 
 fully accomplished. 
 
 169 
 
THE WOMAN VETERAN OF THE 
 CONTINENTAL ARMY 
 
 SAMPSON GAN- 
 NETT, of Sharon, has the unique 
 distinction of presenting the only 
 authenticated case of a woman's enlist- 
 ment and service as a regular soldier in 
 the Revolutionary army. 
 
 The proof of her claim's validity can be 
 found in the resolutions of the General 
 Court of Massachusetts, where, under date 
 of January 20, 1792, those who take the 
 trouble may find this entry : " On the 
 petition of Deborah Gannett, praying com- 
 pensation for services performed in the 
 late army of the United States. 
 170 
 
DEBORAH SAMPSON GANNETT 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 " Whereas, it appears to this court that 
 Deborah Gannett enlisted under the name 
 of Eobert Shurtleff, in Captain Webb's 
 company in the Fourth Massachusetts 
 regiment, on May 21, 1782, and did actu- 
 ally perform the duties of a soldier in the 
 late army of the United States to the 
 twenty-third day of October, 1783, for 
 which she has received no compensation; 
 
 " And, whereas, it further appears that 
 the said Deborah exhibited an extraor- 
 dinary instance of female heroism by dis- 
 charging the duties of a faithful, gallant 
 soldier, and at the same time preserved 
 the virtue and chastity of her sex unsus- 
 pected and unblemished, and was dis- 
 charged from the service with a fair and 
 honourable character; therefore, 
 
 " Resolved, that the treasurer of the 
 Commonwealth be, and hereby is, directed 
 to issue his note to said Deborah for the 
 
 171 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 sum of 34, bearing interest from October 
 23, 1783." 
 
 Thus was the seal of authenticity set 
 upon as extraordinary a story as can be 
 found in the annals of this country. 
 
 Deborah Sampson was born in Plymp- 
 ton, Plymouth County, December 17, 
 1760, of a family descended from Governor 
 Bradford. She had many brothers who 
 enlisted for service early in the war, and it 
 was their example, according to some ac- 
 counts, which inspired her unusual course. 
 
 If one may judge from the hints thrown 
 out in the " Eemale Review," a quaint 
 little pamphlet probably written by Debo- 
 rah herself, and published in 1797, how- 
 ever, it was the ardent wooing of a too 
 importunate lover which drove the girl 
 to her extraordinary undertaking. Two 
 copies of this " Review " are now treas- 
 ured in the Boston Public Library. 
 172 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 In the first chapters, the author dis- 
 courses upon female education and the 
 like, and then, after a sympathetic analysis 
 of the educational aspirations of the 
 heroine (referred to throughout the book 
 as "our illustrious fair"), and a perora- 
 tion on the lady's religious beliefs, de- 
 scribes in Miss Sampson's own words a 
 curious dream she once had. 
 
 The young woman experienced this 
 psychic visitation, the author of the " Re- 
 view " would have us believe, a short time 
 before taking her final step toward the 
 army. In the dream, a serpent bade her 
 " arise, stand on your feet, gird yourself, 
 and prepare to encounter your enemy." 
 This, according to the chronicler's inter- 
 pretation, was one underlying cause of 
 Deborah's subsequent decision to enlist as 
 a soldier. 
 
 Yet her mother's wish that she should 
 
 173 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 marry a man for whom she felt no love 
 is also suggested as a cause, and there is 
 a hint, too, that the death in the battle 
 of Long Island, New York, of a man to 
 whom she was attached, gave the final im- 
 pulse to her plan. At any rate, it was the 
 night that she heard the news of this man's 
 death that she started on her perilous 
 undertaking. 
 
 " Having put in readiness the materials 
 she had judged requisite," writes her chron- 
 icler, " she retired at her usual hour to bed, 
 intending to rise at twelve. . . . There 
 was none but the Invisible who could take 
 cognisance of her passion on assuming her 
 new garb." 
 
 She slipped cautiously away, and trav- 
 elled carefully to Bellingham, where she 
 enlisted as a Continental soldier on a three 
 years' term. She was mustered into the 
 army at Worcester, under the name of 
 174 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 Kobert Shurtleff. With about fifty other 
 soldiers she soon arrived at West Point, 
 and it there fell to her lot to be in Captain 
 Webb's company, in Colonel Shepard's 
 regiment, and in General Patterson's 
 brigade. 
 
 Naturally the girl's disappearance from 
 home had caused her friends and her fam- 
 ily great uneasiness. Her mother re- 
 proached herself for having urged too 
 constantly upon the attention of her child 
 the suit of a man for whom she did not 
 care, and her lover upbraided himself for 
 having been too importunate in his wooing. 
 The telephone and telegraph not having 
 been invented, it was necessary, in order 
 to trace the lost girl, to visit all the places 
 to which Deborah might have flown. Her 
 brother, therefore, made an expedition one 
 hundred miles to the eastward among 
 some of the family relations, and her 
 
 175 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND RQQFTEEES 
 
 suitor took his route to the west of Mas- 
 sachusetts and across into New York 
 State. 
 
 In the course of his search he visited, 
 as it happened, the very place in which 
 Deborah's company was stationed, and 
 saw (though he did not recognise) his lost 
 sweetheart. She recognised him, however, 
 and hearing his account to the officers of 
 her mother's grief and anxiety, sent home 
 as soon as opportunity offered, the follow- 
 ing letter : 
 
 " DEAR PARENT : On the margin of 
 one of those rivers which intersects and 
 winds itself so beautifully majestic through 
 a vast extent of territory of the United 
 States is the present situation of your un- 
 worthy but constant and affectionate 
 daughter. I pretend not to justify or even 
 to palliate my clandestine elopement. In 
 176 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETREES 
 
 hopes of pacifying your mind, which I 
 am sure must be afflicted beyond measure, 
 I write you this scrawl. Conscious of not 
 having thus abruptly absconded by reason 
 of any fancied ill treatment from you, or 
 disaffection toward any, the thoughts of 
 my disobedience are truly poignant. 
 Neither have I a plea that the insults of 
 man have driven me hence: and let this 
 be your consoling reflection that I have 
 not fled to offer more daring insults to 
 them by a proffered prostitution of that 
 virtue which I have always been taught 
 to preserve and revere. The motive is 
 truly important; and when I divulge it 
 my sole ambition and delight shall be to 
 make an expiatory sacrifice for my trans- 
 gression. 
 
 " I am in a large but well regulated 
 family. My employment is agreeable, 
 although it is somewhat different and more 
 
 177 
 
OLD KEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 intense than it was at home. But I appre- 
 hend it is equally as advantageous. My 
 superintendents are indulgent; but to a 
 punctilio they demand a due observance of 
 decorum and propriety of conduct. By 
 this you must know I have become mistress 
 of many useful lessons, though I have 
 many more to learn. Be not too much 
 troubled, therefore, about my present or 
 future engagements; as I will endeavour 
 to make that prudence and virtue my 
 model, for which, I own, I am much in- 
 debted to those who took the charge of my 
 youth. 
 
 " My place of residence and the adjoin- 
 ing country are beyond description de- 
 lightsome. . . . Indeed, were it not for 
 the ravages of war, of which I have seen 
 more here than in Massachusetts, this part 
 of our great continent would become a 
 paradisiacal elysium. Heaven condescend 
 178 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 that a speedy peace may constitute us a 
 happy and independent nation: when the 
 husband shall again be restored to his 
 amiable consort, to wipe her sorrowing 
 tear, the son to the embraces of his mourn- 
 ing parents, and the lover to the tender, 
 disconsolate, and half -distracted object of 
 his love. 
 
 " Your affectionate 
 
 " DAUGHTEB." 
 
 Unfortunately this letter, which had to 
 be entrusted to a stranger, was intercepted. 
 But Deborah did not know this, and her 
 mind at rest, she pursued cheerfully the 
 course she had marked out for herself. 
 
 The fatigue and heat of the march op- 
 pressed the girl soldier more than did bat- 
 tle or the fear of death. Yet at White 
 Plains, her first experience of actual war- 
 fare, her left-hand man was shot dead in 
 
 179 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROQFTEEES 
 
 the second fire, and she herself received 
 two shots through her coat and one through 
 her cap. In the terrible bayonet charge 
 at this same battle, in which she was a par- 
 ticipant, the sight of the bloodshed proved 
 almost too much for her strength. 
 
 At Yorktown she was ordered to work 
 on a battery, which she did right faith- 
 fully. Among her comrades, Deborah's 
 young and jaunty appearance won for her 
 the sobriquet " blooming boy." She was 
 a great favourite in the ranks. She shirked 
 nothing, and did duty sometimes as a 
 common soldier and sometimes as a ser- 
 geant on the lines, patrolling, collecting 
 fuel, and performing such other offices as 
 fell to her lot. 
 
 After the battle of White Plains she 
 
 received two severe wounds, one of which 
 
 was in her thigh. Naturally, a surgeon 
 
 was sent for at once, but the plucky girl, 
 
 180 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 who could far more easily endure pain 
 than the thought of discovery, extracted 
 the ball herself with penknife and needle 
 before hospital aid arrived. 
 
 In the spring of 1783 General Patterson 
 selected her for his waiter, and Deborah 
 so distinguished herself for readiness and 
 courage that the general often praised to 
 the other men of the regiment the heroism 
 of his " smock-faced boy." 
 
 It is at this stage of the story that the 
 inevitable denouement occurred. The 
 young soldier fell ill with a prevailing 
 epidemic, and during her attack of un- 
 consciousness her sex was discovered by the 
 attendant physician, Doctor Bana. Imme- 
 diately she was removed by the physician's 
 orders to the apartment of the hospital 
 matron, under whose care she remained 
 until discharged as well. 
 
 Deborah's appearance in her uniform 
 
 181 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 was sufficiently suggestive, as has been 
 said, of robust masculinity to attract the 
 favourable attention of many young 
 women. What she had not counted upon 
 was the arousing in one of these girls of 
 a degree of interest which should imperil 
 her secret. Her chagrin, the third morn- 
 ing after the doctor's discovery, was appre- 
 ciably deepened, therefore, by the arrival 
 of a love-letter from a rich and charming 
 young woman of Baltimore whom the sol- 
 dier, " Robert Shurtleff," had several 
 times met, but whose identity with the 
 writer of the letter our heroine by no 
 means suspected. This letter, accompanied 
 by a gift of fruit, the compiler of the 
 " Female Review " gives as follows : 
 
 " DEAR SIR : Fraught with the feel- 
 ings of a friend who is doubtless beyond 
 your conception interested in your health 
 
 182 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 and happiness, I take liberty to address you 
 with a frankness which nothing but the 
 purest friendship and affection can pal- 
 liate, know, then, that the charms I first 
 read on your visage brought a passion 
 into my bosom for which I could not ac- 
 count. If it was from the thing called 
 LOVE, I was before mostly ignorant of it, 
 and strove to stifle the fugutive; though 
 I confess the indulgence was agreeable. 
 But repeated interviews with you kindled 
 it into a flame I do not now blush to own : 
 and should it meet a generous return, I 
 shall not reproach myself for its in- 
 dulgence. I have long sought to hear 
 of your department, and how painful 
 is the news I this moment received that 
 you are sick, if alive, in the hospital! 
 Your complicated nerves will not admit 
 of writing, but inform the bearer if you 
 are necessitated for anything that can con- 
 
 183 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROQFTKEES 
 
 duce to your comfort. If you recover and 
 think proper to inquire my name, I will 
 give you an opportunity. But if death 
 is to terminate your existence there, let 
 your last senses be impressed with the re- 
 flection that you die not without one more 
 friend whose tears will bedew your funeral 
 obsequies. Adieu." 
 
 The distressed invalid replied to this 
 note that " he " was not in need of money. 
 The same evening, however, another mis- 
 sive was received, enclosing two guineas. 
 And the like favours Avere continued 
 throughout the soldier's stay at the hos- 
 pital. 
 
 Upon recovery, the " blooming boy " re- 
 sumed his uniform to rejoin the troops. 
 Doctor Bana had kept the secret, and there 
 seemed to Deborah no reason why she 
 
 184 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 should not pursue her soldier career to the 
 end. 
 
 The enamoured maid of Baltimore still 
 remained, however, a thorn in her con- 
 science. And one day, when near Baltimore 
 on a special duty, our soldier was sum- 
 moned by a note to the home of this young 
 woman, who, confessing herself the writer 
 of the anonymous letter, declared her love. 
 Just what response was made to this 
 avowal is not known, but that the attract- 
 ive person in soldier uniform did not at 
 this time tell the maid of Baltimore the 
 whole truth is certain. 
 
 Events were soon, however, to force 
 Deborah to perfect frankness with her ad- 
 mirer. After leaving Baltimore, she went 
 on a special duty journey, in the course of 
 which she was taken captive by In- 
 dians. The savage who had her in his 
 
 185 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 charge she was obliged to kill in self-de- 
 fence, after which there seemed every 
 prospect that she and the single Indian 
 lad who escaped with her would perish in 
 the wilderness, a prey to wild beasts. 
 Thereupon she wrote to her Baltimore 
 admirer thus : 
 
 " DEAR Miss : Perhaps you are 
 
 the nearest friend I have. But a few hours 
 must inevitably waft me to an infinite dis- 
 tance from all sublunary enjoyments, and 
 fix me in a state of changeless retribu- 
 tion. Three years having made me the 
 sport of fortune, I am at length doomed 
 to end my existence in a dreary wilder- 
 ness, unattended except by an Indian boy. 
 If you receive these lines, remember they 
 come from one who sincerely loves you. 
 But, my amiable friend, forgive my imper- 
 
 186 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETEEES 
 
 fections and forget you ever had affection 
 for one so unworthy the name of 
 
 " YOUR OWN SEX." 
 
 No means of sending this letter pre- 
 sented itself, however, and after a dreary 
 wandering, Deborah was enabled to rejoin 
 her soldier friends. Then she proceeded 
 to Baltimore for the express purpose of 
 seeing her girl admirer and telling her the 
 truth. Yet this time, too, she evaded her 
 duty, and left the maiden still unenlight- 
 ened, with a promise to return the ensuing 
 spring a promise, she afterward de- 
 clared, she had every intention of keeping, 
 had not the truth been published to the 
 world in the intervening time. 
 
 Doctor Bana had been only deferring 
 the uncloaking of " Kobert Shurtleff." 
 Upon Deborah's return to duty, he made 
 the culprit herself the bearer of a letter to 
 
 1ST 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 General Patterson, which disclosed the 
 secret. 
 
 The general, who was at West Point at 
 the time, treated her with all possible kind- 
 ness, and commended her for her service, 
 instead of punishing her, as she had feared. 
 Then he gave her a private apartment, and 
 made arrangements to have her safely con- 
 ducted to Massachusetts. 
 
 Not quite yet, however, did Deborah 
 abandon her disguise. She passed the next 
 winter with distant relatives under the 
 name of her youngest brother. But she 
 soon resumed her proper name, and re- 
 turned to her delighted family. 
 
 After the war, she married Benjamin 
 Gannett, and the homestead in Sharon, 
 where she lived for the rest of her life, 
 is still standing, relics of her occupancy, 
 her table and her Bible, being shown there 
 to-day to interested visitors. 
 188 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 In 1802 she made a successful lecturing 
 tour, during which she kept a very inter- 
 esting diary, which is still exhibited to 
 those interested by her great-granddaugh- 
 ter, Mrs. Susan Moody. Her grave in 
 Sharon is carefully preserved, a street has 
 been named in her honour, and several 
 patriotic societies have constituted her 
 their principal deity. Certainly her story 
 is curious enough to entitle her to some 
 distinction. 
 
 189 
 
THE EEDEEMED CAPTIVE 
 
 all the towns settled by English- 
 men in the midst of Indians, none 
 was more thoroughly peaceful in its 
 aims and origin than Deerfield, in the old 
 Pocumtuck Valley. Here under the giant 
 trees of the primeval forest the white- 
 haired Eliot prayed, and beside the banks 
 of the sluggish stream he gathered as 
 nucleus for the town the roving savages 
 upon whom his gospel message had made 
 a deep impression. Quite naturally, there- 
 fore, the men of Pocumtuck were not dis- 
 quieted by news of Indian troubles. With 
 the natives about them they had lived on 
 peaceful terms for many years, and it was 
 190 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 almost impossible for them to believe that 
 they would ever come to shudder at the 
 mere presence of redskins. Yet history 
 tells us, and Deerfield to-day bears witness 
 to the fact, that no town in all the colonies 
 suffered more at the hands of the Indians 
 than did this peaceful village in Western 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 In 1702 King William died, and "good" 
 Queen Anne reigned in his stead. Follow- 
 ing closely upon the latter event came an- 
 other war between France and England, a 
 conflict which, as in the reign of William 
 and Mary, renewed the hostilities between 
 the French and English colonies in Amer- 
 ica. At an early date, accordingly, the set- 
 tlement of Deerfield discovered that it was 
 to be attacked by the French. At once 
 measures were taken to strengthen the 
 fortifications of the town, and to prepare, 
 so far as possible, for the dreaded event. 
 
 191 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 The blow fell on the night of the twenty- 
 ninth of February, 1704, when Major Her- 
 tel de Rouville, with upwards of three 
 hundred and forty French and Indians, 
 arrived at a pine bluff overlooking Deer- 
 field meadow, about two miles north of 
 the village a locality now known as 
 Petty's Plain. Here he halted, to await 
 the appropriate hour for an attack, and 
 it was not until early morning that, leav- 
 ing their packs upon the spot, his men 
 started forward for their terrible work of 
 destruction. Rouville took great pains not 
 to alarm the sentinels in his approach, but 
 the precaution was unnecessary, as the 
 watch were unfaithful, and had retired to 
 rest. Arriving at the fortifications, he 
 found the snow drifted nearly to the top 
 of the palisades, and his entire party en- 
 tered the place undiscovered, while the 
 whole population were in profound sleep. 
 192 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 Quietly distributing themselves in parties, 
 they broke in the doors of the houses, 
 dragged out the astonished inhabitants, 
 killed such as resisted, and took prisoner 
 the majority of the remainder, only a few 
 escaping from their hands into the woods. 
 The house of Reverend John Williams 
 was assaulted at the beginning of the 
 attack. Awakened from sleep, Mr. Will- 
 iams leaped from his bed, and running to 
 the door found the enemy entering. Call- 
 ing to two soldiers who lodged in the house, 
 he sprang back to his bedroom, seized a 
 pistol, cocked it, and presented it at the 
 breast of an Indian who had followed him. 
 It missed fire, and it was well, for the 
 room was thronged in an instant, and he 
 was seized, bound without being allowed the 
 privilege of dressing, and kept standing in 
 the cold for an hour. Meanwhile, the sav- 
 ages amused themselves by taunting him, 
 
 193 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 swinging their hatchets over him and 
 threatening him. Two of his children and 
 a negro woman were then taken to the door 
 and butchered. Mrs. Williams was al- 
 lowed to dress, and she and her five 
 children were taken captives. Other 
 houses in the village were likewise at- 
 tacked, one of them being defended by 
 seven men, for whom the women inside 
 cast bullets while the fight was in progress. 
 But the attacking force was an over- 
 powering one, and De Rouville and his 
 men had by sunrise done their work most 
 successfully with torch and tomahawk. 
 The blood of forty-nine murdered men, 
 women and children reddened the snow. 
 Twenty-nine men, twenty-four women, and 
 fifty-eight children were made captive, and 
 in a few hours the spoil-encumbered enemy 
 were en route for Canada. 
 
 Through the midwinter snow which cov- 
 194 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 ered the fields the poor captives marched 
 out on their terrible pilgrimage. Two of 
 the prisoners succeeded in escaping, where- 
 upon Mr. Williams was ordered to inform 
 the others that if any more slipped away 
 death by fire would be visited upon those 
 who remained. The first night's lodgings 
 were provided for as comfortably as cir- 
 cumstances would permit, and all the able- 
 bodied among the prisoners were made to 
 sleep in barns. On the second day's march 
 Mr. Williams was permitted to speak with 
 his poor wife, whose youngest child had 
 been born only a few weeks before, and to 
 assist her on her journey. 
 
 " On the way," says the pastor, in his 
 famous book, " The Redeemed Captive," 
 " we discoursed on the happiness of those 
 who had a right to an house not made with 
 hands, eternal in the heavens; and God 
 for a father and friend ; as also it was our 
 
 195 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 reasonable duty quietly to submit to the 
 will of God, and to say, ' The will of the 
 Lord be done.' r Thus imparting to one 
 another their heroic courage and Christian 
 strength and consolation, the captive cou- 
 ple pursued their painful way. 
 
 At last the poor woman announced the 
 gradual failure of her strength, and during 
 the short time she was allowed to remain 
 with her husband, expressed good wishes 
 and prayers for him and her children. 
 The narrative proceeds : " She never spake 
 any discontented word as to what had be- 
 fallen her, but with suitable expressions 
 justified God in what had happened. . . . 
 We soon made a halt, in which time my 
 chief surviving master came up, upon which 
 I was put into marching with the foremost, 
 and so made my last farewell of my dear 
 wife, the desire of my eyes, and companion 
 in many mercies and afflictions. Upon our 
 196 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 separation from each other, we asked for 
 each other grace sufficient for what God 
 should call us to." 
 
 For a short time Mrs. Williams re- 
 mained where her husband had left her, 
 occupying her leisure in reading her Bible. 
 He, as was necessary, went on, and soon 
 had to ford a small and rapid stream, and 
 climb a high mountain on its other side. 
 Reaching the top very much exhausted, 
 he was unburdened of his pack. Then his 
 heart went down the steep after his wife. 
 He entreated his master to let him go 
 down and help her, but his desire was re- 
 fused. As the prisoners one after another 
 came up he inquired for her, and at length 
 the news of her death was told to him. 
 In wading the river she had been thrown 
 down by the water and entirely submerged. 
 Yet after great difficulty she had succeeded 
 in reaching the bank, and had penetrated 
 
 197 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 to the foot of the mountain. Here, how- 
 ever, her master had become discouraged 
 with the idea of her maintaining the 
 march, and burying his tomahawk in her 
 head he left her dead. Mrs. Williams was 
 the daughter of Reverend Eleazer Mather, 
 the first minister of Northampton an 
 educated, refined, and noble woman. It is 
 pleasant, while musing upon her sad fate, 
 to recall that her body was found and 
 brought back to Deerfield, where, long 
 years after, her husband was laid by her 
 side. And there to-day sleeps the dust of 
 the pair beneath stones which inform the 
 stranger of the interesting spot. 
 
 Others of the captives were killed upon 
 the journey as convenience required. A 
 journal kept by Stephen Williams, the 
 pastor's son, who was only eleven years 
 old when captured, reflects in an artless 
 way every stage of the terrible journey: 
 198 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 " They travelled/' he writes, " as if they 
 meant to kill us all, for they travelled 
 thirty-five or forty miles a day. . . . 
 Their manner was, if any loitered, to kill 
 them. My feet were very sore, so I thought 
 they would kill me also." 
 
 When the first Sabbath arrived, Mr. 
 Williams was allowed to preach. His text 
 was taken from the Lamentations of Jere- 
 miah, the verse in which occurs the passage, 
 " My virgins and my young men have gone 
 into captivity." 
 
 Thus they progressed, the life of the 
 captives dependent in every case upon 
 their ability to keep up with the party. 
 Here an innocent child would be knocked 
 upon the head and left in the snow, and 
 there some poor woman dropped by the 
 way and killed by the tomahawk. Arriv- 
 ing at White River, De Rouville divided 
 his forces, and the parties took separate 
 
 199 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 routes to Canada. The group to which 
 Mr. Williams was attached went up White 
 River, and proceeded, with various adven- 
 tures, to Sorel in Canada, to which place 
 some of the captives had preceded him. 
 In Canada, all who arrived were treated 
 by the French with great humanity, and 
 Mr. Williams with marked courtesy. He 
 proceeded to Chambly, thence to St. 
 Francis on the St. Lawrence, afterward to 
 Quebec, and at last to Montreal, where 
 Governor Vaudreuil accorded him much 
 kindness, and eventually redeemed him 
 from savage hands. 
 
 Mr. Williams's religious experiences in 
 Canada were characteristic of the times. 
 He was there thrown among Romanists, a 
 sect against which he entertained the most 
 profound dislike profound to the degree 
 of inflammatory conscientiousness, not to 
 say bigotry. His Indian master was deter- 
 200 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETKEES 
 
 mined he should go to church, but he would 
 not, and was once dragged there, where, he 
 says, he " saw a great confusion instead 
 of any Gospel order." The Jesuits as- 
 sailed him on every hand, and gave him 
 but little peace. His master at one time 
 tried to make him kiss a crucifix, under 
 the threat that he would dash out his 
 brains with a hatchet if he should refuse. 
 But he did refuse, and had the good for- 
 tune to save his head as well as his con- 
 science. Mr. Williams's own account of 
 his stay in Canada is chiefly devoted to 
 anecdotes of the temptations to Romanism 
 with which he was beset by the Jesuits. 
 His son Samuel was almost persuaded to 
 embrace the faith of Rome, and his daugh- 
 ter Eunice was, to his great chagrin, forced 
 to say prayers in Latin. But, for the most, 
 the Deerfield captives proved intractable, 
 and were still aggressively Protestant 
 
 201 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 when, in 1706, Mr. Williams and all his 
 children (except Eunice, of whom we shall 
 say more anon), together with the other 
 captives up to the number of fifty-seven, 
 embarked on board a ship sent to Quebec 
 by Governor Dudley, and sailed for Bos- 
 ton. 
 
 A committee of the pastor's people met 
 their old clergyman upon his landing at 
 Boston, and invited him to return to the 
 charge from which he had, nearly three 
 years before, been torn. And Mr. Will- 
 iams had the courage to accept their offer, 
 notwithstanding the fact that the war con- 
 tinued with unabated bitterness. In 1707 
 the town voted to build him a house " as 
 big as Ensign Sheldon's, and a back room 
 as big as may be thought convenient." 
 This house is still standing (1902), though 
 Ensign Sheldon's, the " Old Indian House 
 in Deerfield," as it has been popularly 
 202 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 called, was destroyed more than half a 
 century ago. The Indian House stood at 
 the northern end of Deerfield Common, 
 and exhibited to its latest day the marks 
 of the tomahawk left upon its front door 
 in the attack of 1704, and the perforations 
 made by the balls inside. The door is still 
 preserved, and is one of the most interest- 
 ing relics now to be seen in Memorial Hall, 
 Deerfield. 
 
 For more than twenty years after his 
 return from captivity, Mr. Williams 
 served his parish faithfully. He took into 
 his new house a new wife, by whom he 
 had several children; and in this same 
 house he passed peacefully away June 12, 
 1729, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, 
 and the forty-fifth of his ministry. 
 
 Stephen Williams, who had been taken 
 captive when a lad of eleven, was redeemed 
 in 1705 with his father. In spite of the 
 
 203 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 hardships to which he had been so early ex- 
 posed, he was a fine strong boy when he 
 returned to Deerfield, and he went on with 
 his rudely interrupted education to such 
 good effect that he graduated from Har- 
 vard in 1713 at the age of twenty. In 1716 
 he settled as minister at Longmeadow, 
 in which place he died in 1872. Yet 
 his manhood was not passed without share 
 in the wars of the time, for he was chap- 
 lain in the Louisburg expedition in 1745, 
 and in the regiment of Colonel Ephraim 
 Williams in his fatal campaign in 1755, 
 and again in the Canadian campaign of 
 1756. The portrait of him which is here 
 given was painted about 1748, and is now 
 to be seen in the hall of the Pocumtuck 
 Valley Memorial Association, within four- 
 score rods of the place where the boy cap- 
 tive was born, and from which he was 
 carried as a tender child into captivity. 
 204 
 
REVEREND STEPHEN WILLIAMS 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 It has been said that one of the greatest 
 trials of Mr. Williams's stay in Canada 
 was the discovery that his little daughter, 
 Eunice, had been taught by her Canadian 
 captors to say prayers in Latin. But this 
 was only the beginning of the sorrow of 
 the good man's life. Eunice was a plastic 
 little creature, and she soon adopted not 
 only the religion, but also the manners and 
 customs of the Indians among whom she 
 had fallen. In fact and feeling she became 
 a daughter of the Indians, and there among 
 them she married, on arriving at woman- 
 hood, an Indian by whom she had a family 
 of children. A few years after the war she 
 made her first visit to her Deerfield rela- 
 tives, and subsequently she came twice to 
 Massachusetts dressed in Indian costume. 
 But all the inducements held out to her to 
 remain there were in vain. During her 
 last visit she was the subject of many 
 
 205 
 
/OLD NEW ENGLAND RQOFTREES 
 
 eight years between the dates of Williams's 
 and the Dauphin's birth, and nearly every 
 part of the clergyman's life was found to 
 have been spent in quite a commonplace 
 way. For as a boy, Eleazer Williams 
 lived with Reverend Mr. Ely, on the Con- 
 necticut River, and his kinsman, Doctor 
 Williams, of Deerfield, at once asserted 
 that he remembered him very well at all 
 stages of his boyhood. 
 
 Governor Charles K. Williams, of Ver- 
 mont, writing from Rutland under date 
 February 26, 1853, said of the Reverend 
 Eleazer and his " claims " to the throne of 
 France, " I never had any doubt that Will- 
 iams was of Indian extraction, and a de- 
 scendant of Eunice Williams. His father 
 and mother were both of them at my 
 father's house, although I cannot ascertain 
 definitely the year. I consider the whole 
 story a humbug, and believe that it will 
 208 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 be exploded in the course of a few months." 
 As a matter of fact, the story has been 
 exploded, though the features of the 
 Reverend Eleazer Williams, when in the 
 full flush of manhood, certainly bore a 
 remarkable resemblance to those of the 
 Erench kings from whom his descent was 
 claimed. His mixed blood might account 
 for this, however. Williams's paternal 
 grandfather was an English physician, 
 not of the Deerfield family at all, and 
 his grandmother the daughter of Eunice 
 Williams and her redskin mate. His 
 father was Thomas Williams, captain in 
 the British service during the American 
 Revolution, and his mother a French- 
 woman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was 
 part English, part Yankee, part Indian, 
 and part Erench, a combination sufficiently 
 complex to account, perhaps, even for an 
 unmistakably Bourbon chin. 
 
 209 
 
NEW ENGLAND'S EIEST "CLUB 
 WOMAN " 
 
 M WEN today, in this emancipated 
 f*. twentieth century, women minis- 
 ters and " female preachers " are 
 not infrequently held up to derision by 
 those who delight to sit in the seat of the 
 scornful. Trials for heresy are likewise 
 still common. It is not at all strange, 
 therefore, that Mistress Ann Hutchinson 
 should, in 1636, have been driven out of 
 Boston as an enemy dangerous to public 
 order, her specific offence being that she 
 maintained in her own house that a mere 
 profession of faith could not evidence sal- 
 210 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 vation, unless the Spirit first revealed itself 
 from within. 
 
 Mrs. Hutchinson's maiden name was 
 Ann Marbury, and she was the daughter of 
 a scholar and a theologian one Francis 
 Marbury who was first a minister of 
 Lincolnshire and afterward of London. 
 Naturally, much of the girl's as well as 
 the greater part of the woman's life was 
 passed in the society of ministers men 
 whom she soon learned to esteem more for 
 what they knew than for what they 
 preached. Theology, indeed, was the at- 
 mosphere in which she lived and moved 
 and had her being. Intellectually, she was 
 an enthusiast, morally an agitator, a clever 
 leader, whom Winthrop very aptly de- 
 scribed as a " woman of ready wit and 
 bold spirit." 
 
 While still young, this exceptionally 
 gifted woman married William Hutchin- 
 
 211 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 son, a country gentleman of good character 
 and estate, whose home was also in Lin- 
 colnshire. Winthrop has nothing but 
 words of contempt for Mrs. Hutchinson's 
 husband, but there is little doubt that a 
 sincere attachment existed between the 
 married pair, and that Hutchinson was 
 a man of sterling character and worth, 
 even though he was intellectually the infe- 
 rior of his remarkable wife. In their Lin- 
 colnshire home the Hutchinsons had been 
 parishioners of the Reverend John Cotton, 
 and regular attendants at that celebrated 
 divine 7 ? church in Boston, England. To 
 him, her pastor, Mrs. Hutchinson was 
 deeply attached. And when the minister 
 fled to New England in order to escape 
 from the tyranny of the bishops, the Hutch- 
 insons also decided to come to America, 
 and presently the whole family did so. 
 Mrs. Hutchinson' s daughter, who had mar- 
 212 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 ried the Reverend John Wright Wheel- 
 wright another Lincolnshire minister 
 who had suffered at the hands of Arch- 
 bishop Laud came with her mother. 
 Besides the daughter, there were three 
 grown sons in the family at the time Mrs. 
 Hutchinson landed in the Boston she was 
 afterward to rend with religious dissension. 
 So it was no young, sentimental, unbal- 
 anced girl, but a middle-aged, matured, 
 and experienced woman of the world who, 
 in the autumn of 1634, took sail for New 
 England. During the voyage it was learned 
 that Mrs. Hutchinson came primed for 
 religious controversy. With some Puritan 
 ministers who were on the same vessel she 
 discussed eagerly abstruse theological ques- 
 tions, and she hinted in no uncertain way 
 that when they should arrive in New Eng- 
 land they might expect to hear more from 
 her. Clearly, she regarded herself as one 
 
 213 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 with a mission. In unmistakable terms she 
 avowed her belief that direct revelations 
 are made to the elect, and asserted that 
 nothing of importance had ever happened 
 to her which had not been revealed to her 
 beforehand. 
 
 Upon their arrival in Boston, the Hutch- 
 insons settled down in a house on the site 
 of the present Old Corner Book Store, the 
 head of the family made arrangements to 
 enter upon his business affairs, and in due 
 time both husband and wife made their 
 application to be received as members of 
 the church. This step was indispensable 
 to admit the pair into Christian fellowship 
 and to allow to Mr. Hutchinson the privi- 
 leges of a citizen. He came through the 
 questioning more easily than did his wife, 
 for, in consequence of the reports already 
 spread concerning her extravagant opin- 
 ions, Mrs. Hutchinson was subjected to a 
 214 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 most searching examination. Finally, 
 however, she, too, passed through the or- 
 deal safely, the examining ministers, one 
 of whom was her old and beloved pastor, 
 Mr. Cotton, declaring themselves satisfied 
 with her answers. So, in November, we 
 find her a " member in good standing " of 
 the Boston church. 
 
 From this time forward Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son was a person of great importance in 
 Boston. Sir Harry Vane, then governor of 
 the colony and the idol of the people, was 
 pleased, with Mr. Cotton, to take much 
 notice of the gifted newcomer, and their 
 example was followed by the leading and 
 influential people of the town, who treated 
 her with much consideration and respect, 
 and were quick to recognise her intellec- 
 tuality as far superior to that of most mem- 
 bers of her sex. Mrs. Hutchinson soon 
 came, indeed, to be that very remarkable 
 
 215 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 thing a prophet honoured in her own 
 community. Adopting an established cus- 
 tom of the town, she held in her own home 
 two weekly meetings one for men and 
 women and one exclusively for women 
 at which she was the oracle. And all these 
 meetings were very generously attended. 
 
 Mrs. Hutchinson seems to have been 
 New England's first clubwoman. Never 
 before had women come together for inde- 
 pendent thought and action. To be sure, 
 nothing more lively than the sermon 
 preached the Sunday before was ever dis- 
 cussed at these gatherings, but the talk was 
 always pithy and bright, the leader's wit 
 was always ready, and soon the house at the 
 corner of what is now School Street came 
 to be widely celebrated aS the centre of 
 an influence so strong and far-reaching 
 as to make the very ministers jealous and 
 fearful. At first, to be sure, the parsons 
 216 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 themselves went to the meetings. Cotton, 
 Vane, Wheelwright, and Coddington, com- 
 pletely embraced the leader's views, and 
 the result upon Winthrop of attendance 
 at these conferences was to send that official 
 home to his closet, wrestling with himself, 
 yet more than half persuaded. 
 
 Hawthorne's genius has conjured up the 
 scene at Boston's first " parlour talks," so 
 that we too may attend and be one among 
 the u crowd of hooded women and men in 
 steeple hats and close-cropped hair . . . 
 assembled at the door and open windows 
 of a house newly-built. An earnest ex- 
 pression glows in every face ... and 
 some press inward as if the bread of life 
 were to be dealt forth, and they feared to 
 lose their share." 
 
 In plain English Ann Hutchinson's 
 doctrines were these : a She held and advo- 
 cated as the highest truth," writes Mr. 
 
 217 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETEEES 
 
 Drake, " that a person could be justified 
 only by an actual and manifest revelation 
 of the Spirit to him personally. There 
 could be no other evidence of grace. She 
 repudiated a doctrine of works, and she de- 
 nied that holiness of living alone could be 
 received as evidence of regeneration, since 
 hypocrites might live outwardly as pure 
 lives as the saints do. The Puritan 
 churches held that sanctification by the 
 will was evidence of justification." In ad- 
 vancing these views, Mrs. Hutchinson's 
 pronounced personal magnetism stood her 
 in good stead. She made many converts, 
 and, believing herself inspired to do a cer- 
 tain work, and emboldened by the increas- 
 ing number of her followers, she soon 
 became unwisely and unpleasantly aggres- 
 sive in her criticisms of those ministers 
 who preached a covenant of works. She 
 seems to have been led into speaking her 
 218 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 mind as to doctrines and persons more 
 freely than was consistent with prudence 
 and moderation, because she was altogether 
 unsuspicious that what was being said in 
 the privacy of her own house was being 
 carefully treasured up against her. So she 
 constantly added fuel to the flame, which 
 was soon to burst forth to her undoing. 
 
 She was accused of fostering sedition 
 in the church, and was then confronted 
 with charges relative to the meetings of 
 women held at her house. This she suc- 
 cessfully parried. 
 
 It looked indeed as if she would surely 
 be acquitted, when by an impassioned dis- 
 course upon special revelations that had 
 come to her, and an assertion that God 
 would miraculously protect her whatever 
 the court might decree, she impugned the 
 position of her judges and roused keen 
 resentment. Because of this it was that 
 
 219 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 she was banished " as unfit for our so- 
 ciety." In the colony records of Massachu- 
 setts the sentence pronounced reads as 
 follows : " Mrs. Hutchinson (the wife of 
 Mr. William Hutchinson) being convented 
 for traducing the ministers and their min- 
 istry in this country, shee declared volun- 
 tarily her revelations for her ground, 
 and that shee should bee delivred and the 
 Court ruined with their posterity; and 
 thereupon was banished, and the mean- 
 while she was committed to Mr. Joseph 
 Weld untill the Court shall dispose of her." 
 Mrs. Hutchinson passed next winter ac- 
 cordingly under the watch and ward of 
 Thomas Weld, in the house of his brother 
 Joseph, near what is now Eustis Street, 
 Roxbury. She was there until March, 
 when, returning to Boston for further 
 trial, she was utterly cast out, even John 
 
 220 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Cotton, who had been her friend, turning 
 against her. 
 
 Mr. Cotton did not present an heroic 
 figure in this trial. Had he chosen, he 
 might have turned the drift of public 
 opinion in Mrs. Hutchinson's favour, but 
 he was either too weak or too politic to 
 withstand the pressure brought to bear 
 upon him, and he gave a qualified adhesion 
 to the proceedings. Winthrop did not 
 hesitate to use severe measures, and in the 
 course of the struggle Vane, who deeply 
 admired the Boston prophetess, left the 
 country in disgust. Mrs. Hutchinson was 
 arraigned at the bar as if she had been a 
 criminal of the most dangerous kind. Win- 
 throp, who presided, catechised her merci- 
 lessly, and all endeavoured to extort from 
 her some damaging admission. But in this 
 they were unsuccessful. " Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son can tell when to speak and when to 
 
 221 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 hold her tongue," commented the governor, 
 in describing the court proceedings. Yet 
 when all is said, the " trial " was but a 
 mockery, and those who read the proceed- 
 ings as preserved in the " History of 
 Massachusetts Under the Colony and Prov- 
 ince/' written by Governor Hutchinson, 
 a descendant of our heroine, will be quick 
 to condemn the judgment there pro- 
 nounced by a court which expounded 
 theology instead of law against a woman 
 who, as Coddington truly said, " had 
 broken no law, either of God or of man." 
 Banishment was the sentence pro- 
 nounced, and after the church which had 
 so lately caressed and courted Mrs. Hutch- 
 inson had in its turn visited upon her the 
 verdict of excommunication, her husband 
 sold all his property and removed with his 
 family to the island of Aquidneck, as did 
 also many others whose opinions had 
 222 
 
OLD 1STEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 brought them under the censure of the 
 governing powers. In this connection it 
 is worth noting that the head of the house 
 of Hutchinson stood right valiantly by his 
 persecuted wife, and when a committee of 
 the Boston church went in due time to 
 Rhode Island for the purpose of bringing 
 back into the fold the sheep which they ad- 
 judged lost, Mr. Hutchinson told them 
 bluntly that, far from being of their 
 opinion, he accounted his wife " a dear 
 saint and servant of God." 
 
 The rest of Mrs. Hutchinson's story is 
 soon told. Upon the death of her husband, 
 which occurred five years after the banish- 
 ment, she went with her family into the 
 Dutch territory of New Netherlands, set- 
 tling near what is now New Rochelle. And 
 scarcely had she become established in this 
 place when her house was suddenly as- 
 saulted by hostile Indians, who, in their 
 
 323 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 revengeful fury, murdered the whole fam- 
 ily, excepting only one daughter, who was 
 carried away into captivity. Thus in the 
 tragedy of an Indian massacre was 
 quenched the light of the most remark- 
 able intellect Boston has ever made historic 
 by misunderstanding. 
 
 Hawthorne, in writing in his early man- 
 hood of Mrs. Hutchinson (" Biographical 
 Sketches "), humourously remarked, Seer 
 that he was : " There are portentous indi- 
 cations, changes gradually taking place in 
 the habits and feelings of the gentler sex, 
 which seem to threaten our posterity with 
 many of those public women whereof one 
 was a burden too grievous for our fathers." 
 
 Fortunately, we of to-day have learned 
 to take our clubwomen less tragically than 
 Winthrop was able to do. 
 
 224 
 
IN THE KEIGN OF THE WITCHES 
 
 of the most interesting of the 
 phenomena to be noted by the stu- 
 dent of historical houses is the 
 tenacity of tradition. People may be told 
 again and again that a story attributed to 
 a certain site has been proven untrue, but 
 they still look with veneration on a place 
 which has been hallowed many years, and 
 refuse to give up any alluring name by 
 which they have known it. A notable 
 example of this is offered by what is uni- 
 versally called the Old Witch House, sit- 
 uated at the corner of Essex and North 
 Streets, Salem. A dark, scowling build- 
 ing, set far enough back from the street 
 
 225 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND RQOFTEEES 
 
 for a modern drugstore to stand in front of 
 it, the house itself is certainly sufficiently 
 sinister in appearance to warrant its name, 
 even though one is assured by authorities 
 that no witch was ever known to have lived 
 there. Its sole connection with witch- 
 craft, history tells us, is that some of the 
 preliminary examinations of witches took 
 place here, the house being at the time the 
 residence of Justice Jonathan Corwin. 
 Yet it is this house that has absorbed the 
 interest of historical pilgrims to Salem 
 through many years, just because it looks 
 like a witch-house, and somebody once 
 made a muddled statement by which it 
 came to be so regarded. 
 
 This house is the oldest standing in 
 Salem or its vicinity, having been built 
 before 1635. And it really has a claim to 
 fame as the Roger Williams house, for it 
 was here that the great " Teacher " lived 
 226 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 during his troubled settlement in Salem. 
 The people of Salem, it will be remem- 
 bered, persistently sought Williams as 
 their spiritual pastor and master until the 
 General Court at Boston unseated the 
 Salem deputies for the acts of their con- 
 stituents in retaining a man of whom they 
 disapproved, and the magistrates sent 
 a vessel to Salem to remove Mr. Will- 
 iams to England. The minister eluded his 
 persecutors by fleeing through the wintry 
 snows into the wilderness, to become the 
 founder of the State of Rhode Island. 
 
 Mr. Williams was a close friend and 
 confidential adviser of Governor Endicott, 
 and those who were alarmed at the govern- 
 or's impetuosity in cutting the cross from 
 the king's colours, attributed the act to 
 his [Williams's] influence. In taking his 
 departure from the old house of the pic- 
 ture to make his way to freedom, Williams 
 
 227 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 had no guide save a pocket compass, whicli 
 his descendants still exhibit, and no reli- 
 ance but the friendly disposition of the 
 Indians toward him. 
 
 But it is of the witchcraft delusion with 
 which the house of our picture is connected 
 rather than with Williams and his story, 
 that I wish now to speak. Jonathan Cor- 
 win, or Curwin, who was the house's link 
 to witchcraft, was made a councillor under 
 the new charter granted Massachusetts by 
 King William in 1692, and was, as has 
 been said, one of the justices before whom 
 the preliminary witch examinations were 
 held. He it was who officiated at the trial 
 of Rebecca Nourse, of Danvers, hanged as 
 a witch July 19, 1692, as well as at many 
 other less remarkable and less revolting 
 cases. 
 
 Rebecca Nourse, aged and infirm and 
 universally beloved by her neighbours, was 
 228 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 accused of being a witch why, one is 
 unable to find out. The jury was con- 
 vinced of her innocence, and brought in a 
 verdict of " not guilty," but the court sent 
 them out again with instructions to find 
 her guilty. This they did, and she was 
 executed. The tradition is that her sons 
 disinterred her body by stealth from the 
 foot of the gallows where it had been 
 thrown, and brought it to the old home- 
 stead, now still standing in Danvers, laying 
 it reverently, and with many tears, in the 
 little family burying ground near by. 
 
 The majority of the persons condemned 
 in Salem were either old or weak-witted, 
 victims who in their testimony condemned 
 themselves, or seemed to the jury to do 
 so. Tituba, the Indian slave, is an example 
 of this. She was tried in March, 1692, 
 by the Justice Corwin of the big, dark 
 house. She confessed that under threats 
 
 229 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 from Satan, who had most often appeared 
 to her as a man in black, accompanied 
 by a yellow bird, she had tortured the 
 girls who appeared against her. She 
 named accomplices, and was condemned 
 to imprisonment. After a few months 
 she was sold to pay the expenses of 
 her lodging in jail, and is lost to his- 
 tory. But this was by no means the end 
 of the matter. The " afflicted children " 
 in Salem who had made trouble be- 
 fore now began to accuse men and women 
 of unimpeachable character. Within a 
 few months several hundred people were 
 arrested and thrown into jails. As Gov- 
 ernor Hutch inson, the historian of the 
 time, points out, the only way to prevent 
 an accusation was to become an accuser 
 oneself. The state of affairs was indeed 
 analogous to that which obtained in France 
 a century later, when, during the Reign of 
 230 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Terror, men of property and position lived 
 in the hourly fear of being regarded as 
 " a suspect," and frequently threw suspi- 
 cion on their neighbours the better to re- 
 tain their own heads. 
 
 We of to-day cannot understand the 
 madness that inspired such cruelty. But 
 in the light of Michelet's theory, that in 
 the oppression and dearth of every kind 
 of ideal interest in rural populations 
 some safety-valve had to be found, and 
 that there were real organised secret meet- 
 ings, witches' Sabbaths, to supply this need 
 of sensation, the thing is less difficult 
 to comprehend. The religious hysteria 
 that resulted in the banishment of Mrs. 
 Hutchinson was but another phase of the 
 same thing. And the degeneration to be 
 noted to-day in the remote hill-towns of 
 New England is likewise attributable to 
 Michelet's " dearth of ideal interest." 
 
 231 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 The thing once started, it grew, of 
 course, by what it fed upon. Professor 
 William James, Harvard's distinguished 
 psychologist, has traced to torture the so- 
 called " confessions " on which the evil 
 principally throve. A person, he says, 
 was suddenly found to be suffering from 
 what we to-day should call hysteria, per- 
 haps, but what in those days was called 
 a witch disease. A witch then had to be 
 found to account for the disease ; a scape- 
 goat must of necessity be brought forward. 
 Some poor old woman was thereupon 
 picked out and subjected to atrocious tor- 
 ture. If she " confessed," the torture 
 ceased. Naturally she very often " con- 
 fessed," thus implicating others and 
 damning herself. Negative suggestion this 
 modern psychologist likewise offers as 
 light upon witchcraft. The witches sel- 
 dom cried, no matter what their anguish 
 232 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 of mind might be. The inquisitors used 
 to say to them then, " If you're riot a 
 witch, cry, let us see your tears. There, 
 there ! you can't cry ! That proves you're 
 a witch ! " 
 
 Moreover, that was an age when every- 
 body read the Bible, and believed in its 
 verbal inspiration. And there in Exodus 
 (22:18), is the plain command, "Thou 
 shalt not suffer a witch to live." Cotton 
 Mather, the distinguished young divine, 
 had published a work affirming his belief 
 in witchcraft, and detailing his study of 
 some bewitched children in Charlestown, 
 one of whom he had taken into his own 
 family, the better to observe the case. 
 The king believed in it, and Queen Anne, 
 to whose name we usually prefix the adjec- 
 tive " good," wrote to Governor Phips a 
 letter which shows that she admitted 
 witchcraft as a thing unquestioned. 
 
 233 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 It is in connection with the witchcraft 
 delusion in Salem that we get the one 
 instance in New England of the old Eng- 
 lish penalty for contumacy, that of a vic- 
 tim's being pressed to death. Giles Corey, 
 who believed in witchcraft and was instru- 
 mental in the conviction of his wife, so 
 suffered, partly to atone for his early 
 cowardice and partly to save his property 
 for his children. This latter thing he 
 could not have done if he had been con- 
 victed of witchcraft, so after pleading 
 " not guilty/' he remained mute, refusing 
 to add the necessary technical words that he 
 would be tried " by God and his country." 
 
 The arrest of Mrs. Corey, we learn, fol- 
 lowed closely on the heels of that of Tituba 
 and her companions. The accused was a 
 woman of sixty, and the third wife of 
 Corey. She seems to have been a person of 
 unusual strength of character, and from 
 234 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 the first denounced the witchcraft excite- 
 ment, trying to persuade her husband, who 
 believed all the monstrous stories then cur- 
 rent, not to attend the hearings or in any 
 way countenance the proceedings. Per- 
 haps it was this well-known attitude of hers 
 that directed suspicion to her. 
 
 At her trial the usual performance was 
 enacted. The " afflicted girls " fell on the 
 floor, uttered piercing shrieks, and cried 
 out upon their victim. " There is a man 
 whispering in her ear ! " one of them sud- 
 denly exclaimed. " What does he say to 
 you ? " the judge demanded of Martha 
 Corey, accepting at once the " spectral 
 evidence." " We must not believe all these 
 distracted children say,' 7 was her sensible 
 answer. But good sense was not much 
 regarded at witch trials, and she was con- 
 victed and not long afterward executed. 
 Her husband's evidence, which went 
 
 235 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 strongly against her, is here given as a 
 good example of much of the testimony 
 by which the nineteen Salem victims of 
 the delusion were sent to Gallows Hill. 
 
 " One evening I was sitting by the fire 
 when my wife asked me to go to bed. I 
 told her that I would go to prayer, and 
 when I went to prayer I could not utter 
 my desires with any sense, nor open my 
 mouth to speak. After a little space I 
 did according to my measure attend the 
 duty. Some time last week I fetched an 
 ox well out of the woods about noon, and 
 he laying down in the yard, I went to 
 raise him to yoke him, but he could not 
 rise, but dragged his hinder parts as if 
 he had been hip shot, but after did rise. 
 I had a cat some time last week strongly 
 taken on the sudden, and did make me 
 think she would have died presently. My 
 wife bid me knock her in the head, but 
 236 
 
OLD 1STEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 I did not, and since she is well. My wife 
 hath been wont to sit up after I went to 
 bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down 
 as if she were at prayer, but heard 
 nothing." 
 
 Incredible as it seems to-day, this was 
 accepted as " evidence " of Mrs. Corey's 
 bewitchment. Then, as so often happened, 
 Giles Corey, the accuser, was soon himself 
 accused. He was arrested, taken from his 
 mill, and brought before the judges of the 
 special court appointed by Governor 
 Phips to hear the witch trials in Salem. 
 Again the girls went through their per- 
 formance, again there was an endeavour 
 to extort a confession. But this time 
 Corey acted the part of a man. He had 
 had leisure for reflection since he had tes- 
 tified against his wife, and he was now as 
 sure that she was guiltless as that he him- 
 self was. Bitter, indeed, must have been 
 
 237 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 the realisation that he had helped convict 
 her. But he atoned, as has been said, to 
 her and to his children by subjecting him- 
 self to veritable martyrdom. Though an 
 old man whose hair was whitened with the 
 snows of eighty winters, he " was laid on 
 his back, a board placed on his body with as 
 great a weight upon it as he could endure, 
 while his sole diet consisted of a few 
 morsels of bread one day, and a draught 
 of water the alternate day until death put 
 an end to his sufferings." Rightly must 
 this mode of torture have been named 
 peine forte et dure. On Gallows Hill 
 three days later occurred the execution of 
 eight persons, the last so to suffer in the 
 Colony. Nineteen people in all were 
 hanged, and one was pressed to death in 
 Salem, but there is absolutely no founda- 
 tion for the statement that some were 
 burned. 
 
 238 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 The revulsion that followed the cessa- 
 tion of the delusion was as marked as was 
 the precipitation that characterised the 
 proceedings. Many of the clergy con- 
 cerned in the trials offered abject apologies, 
 and Judge Sewall, noblest of all the civil 
 and ecclesiastical authorities implicated in 
 the madness, stood up on Fast Day before 
 a great congregation in the South Church, 
 Boston, acknowledged his grievous error 
 in accepting " spectral evidence/' and to 
 the end of his life did penance yearly in 
 the same meeting-house for his part in the 
 transactions. 
 
 Not inappropriately the gloomy old 
 house in which the fanatical Corwin had 
 his home is to-day given over to a dealer 
 in antique furniture. Visitors are freely 
 admitted upon application, and very many 
 in the course of the year go inside to feast 
 their eyes on the ancient wainscoting and 
 
 239 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 timbers. The front door and the overhang- 
 ing roof are just as in the time of the 
 witches, and from a recessed area at the 
 back, narrow casements and excrescent 
 stairways are still to be seen. The original 
 house had, however, peaked gables, with 
 pineapples carved in wood surmounting its 
 latticed windows and colossal chimneys 
 that placed it unmistakably in the age 
 of ruffs, Spanish cloaks, and long rapiers. 
 
 240 
 
LADY WENTWORTH OF THE HALL 
 
 one of those pleasant long even- 
 i n g s ? when the group of friends that 
 Longfellow represents in his " Tales 
 of the Wayside Inn " had gathered in the 
 twilight about the cheery open fire of the 
 house at Sudbury to tell each other tales 
 of long ago, we hear best the story of 
 Martha Hilton. We seem to catch the 
 poet's voice as he says after the legend from 
 the Baltic h^s been alluringly related by 
 the Musician : 
 
 " These tales you tell are, one and all, 
 Of the Old World, 
 
 Flowers gathered from a crumbling wall, 
 Dead leaves that rustle as they fall ; 
 Let me present you in their stead 
 Something of our New England earth ; 
 A tale which, though of no great worth, 
 Has still this merit, that it yields 
 
 241 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 A certain freshness of the fields, 
 
 A sweetness as of home-made bread." 
 
 And then, as the others leaned back to 
 listen, there followed the beautiful ballad 
 which celebrates the fashion in which 
 Martha Hilton, a kitchen maid, became 
 " Lady Wentworth of the Hall." 
 
 The old Wentworth mansion, where, as 
 a beautiful girl, Martha came, served, and 
 conquered all who knew her, and even once 
 received as her guest the Father of his 
 Country, is still in an admirably preserved 
 state, and the Wayside Inn, rechristened 
 the Red Horse Tavern, still entertains glad 
 guests. 
 
 This inn was built about 1686, and for 
 almost a century and a half from 1714 it 
 was kept as a public house by generation 
 after generation of Howes, the last of 
 the name at the inn being Lyman Howe, 
 who served guests of the house from 1831 
 242 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 to about 1860, and was the good friend and 
 comrade of the brilliant group of men 
 Longfellow has poetically immortalised in 
 the " Tales." The modern successor of 
 Staver's Inn, or the " Earl of Halifax," in 
 the doorway of which Longfellow's worthy 
 dame once said, " as plain as day : " 
 
 " Oh, Martha Hilton ! Fie ! how dare you go 
 About the town half dressed and looking so! " 
 
 is also standing, and has recently been 
 decorated by a memorial tablet. 
 
 In Portsmouth Martha Hilton is well 
 remembered, thanks to Longfellow and 
 tradition, as a slender girl who, barefooted, 
 ragged, with neglected hair, bore from the 
 well 
 
 " A pail of water dripping through the street, 
 And bathing as she went her naked feet." 
 
 Nor do the worthy people of Portsmouth 
 fail to recall the other actor in this mem- 
 
 243 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 orable drama, upon which the Earl of 
 Halifax once benignly smiled: 
 
 " A portly person, with three-cornered hat, 
 A crimson velvet coat, head high in air, 
 Gold-headed cane and nicely powdered hair, 
 And diamond buckles sparkling at his knees, 
 Dignified, stately, florid, much at ease. 
 For this was Governor Wentworth, driving down 
 To Little Harbour, just beyond the town, 
 Where his Great House stood, looking out to sea, 
 A goodly place, where it was good to be." 
 
 There are even those who can perfectly 
 recollect when the house was very venerable 
 in appearance, and when in its rooms were 
 to be seen the old spinet, the Strafford por- 
 trait, and many other things delightful to 
 the antiquary. Longfellow's description 
 of this ancient domicile is particularly 
 beautiful : 
 
 < It was a pleasant mansion, an abode 
 Near and yet hidden from the great highroad, 
 244 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Sequestered among trees, a noble pile, 
 Baronial and Colonial in its style ; 
 Gables and dormer windows everywhere 
 Pandalan pipes, on which all winds that blew 
 Made mournful music the whole winter through. 
 Within, unwonted splendours met the eye, 
 Panels, and floors of oak, and tapestry ; 
 Carved chimneypieces, where, on brazen dogs, 
 Revelled and roared the Christmas fire of logs. 
 Doors opening into darkness unawares, 
 Mysterious passages and flig'its of stairs; 
 And on the walls, in heavy-gilded frames, 
 The ancestral Wentworths, with old Scripture 
 
 names. 
 Such was the mansion where the great man 
 
 dwelt." 
 
 The place thus prettily pictured is at 
 the mouth of Sagamore Creek, not more 
 than two miles from the town of Ports- 
 mouth. The exterior of the mansion as it 
 looks to-day does not of itself live up to 
 one's preconceived idea of colonial mag- 
 nificence. A rambling collection of build- 
 ings, seemingly the result of various " L " 
 expansions, form an inharmonious whole 
 
 245 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 which would have made Ruskin quite mad. 
 The site is, however, charming, for the 
 place commands a view up and down Little 
 Harbour, though concealed by an eminence 
 from the road. The house is said to have 
 originally contained as many as fifty-two 
 rooms. If so, it has shrunk in recent 
 years. But there is still plenty of elbow 
 space, and the cellar is even to-day large 
 enough to accommodate a fair-sized troop 
 of soldiery. 
 
 As one enters, one notices first the rack 
 in which were wont to be deposited the 
 muskets of the governor's guard. And it 
 requires only a little imagination to pic- 
 ture the big rooms as they were in the 
 old days, with the portrait of Strafford 
 dictating to his secretary just before his 
 execution, the rare Copley, the green dam- 
 ask-covered furniture, and the sedan-chair, 
 all exhaling an atmosphere of old-time 
 246 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 splendour and luxury. Something of im- 
 pressiveness has recently been introduced 
 into the interior by the artistic arrange- 
 ment of old furniture which the house's 
 present owner, Mr. Templeton Coolidge, 
 has brought about. But the exterior is 
 " spick-span " in modern yellow and white 
 paint ! 
 
 Yet it was in this very house that 
 Martha for seven years served her future 
 lord. There, busy with mop and pail 
 
 " A maid of all work, whether coarse or fine, 
 A servant who made service seem divine ! " 
 
 she grew from childhood into the lovely 
 woman whom Governor Wentworth wooed 
 and won. 
 
 In the March of 1760 it was that the 
 host at Little Harbour exclaimed abruptly 
 to the good rector of St. John's, who had 
 been dining sumptuously at the manor- 
 house : 
 
 247 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 " This is my birthday ; it shall likewise 
 be my wedding-day, and you shall marry 
 me ! " No wonder the listening guests 
 were greatly mystified, as Martha and the 
 portly governor were joined " across the 
 walnuts and the wine " by the Reverend 
 Arthur Brown, of the Established Church. 
 
 And now, of course, Martha had her 
 chariot, from which she could look down 
 as disdainfully as did the Earl of Halifax 
 on the humble folk who needs must walk. 
 The sudden elevation seems, indeed, to 
 have gone to my lady's head. For tradi- 
 tion says that very shortly after her mar- 
 riage Martha dropped her ring and sum- 
 moned one of her late kitchen colleagues 
 to rescue it from the floor. But the col- 
 league had quickly become shortsighted, 
 and Martha, dismissing her hastily, picked 
 up the circlet herself. 
 
 Before the Reverend Arthur Brown was 
 248 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 gathered to his fathers, he had another 
 opportunity to marry the fascinating 
 Martha to another Wentworth, a man of 
 real soldierly distinction. Her second hus- 
 band was redcoated Michael, of England, 
 who had been in the battle of Culloden. 
 
 This Colonel Michael Wentworth was 
 the " great buck " of his day, and was wont 
 to fiddle at Stoodley's far into the morning 
 for sheer love of fiddling and revelry. 
 Stoodley's has now fallen indeed ! It is 
 the brick building marked "custom-house," 
 and it stands at the corner of Daniel and 
 Penhallow Streets. 
 
 To this Lord and Lady Wentworth it 
 was that Washington, in 1789, came as a 
 guest, " rowed by white-jacketed sailors 
 straight to their vine-hung, hospitable 
 door." At this time there was a younger 
 Martha in the house, one who had grown 
 up to play the spinet by the long, low 
 
 249 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 windows, and who later joined her fate 
 to that of still another Wentworth, with 
 whom she passed to France. 
 
 A few years later, in 1795, the " great 
 buck " of his time took to a bankrupt's 
 grave in New York, forgetting, so the story 
 goes, the eternal canon fixed against self- 
 slaughter. 
 
 But for all we tell as a legend this story 
 of Martha Hilton, and for all her " cap- 
 ture " of the governor has come down to 
 us almost as a myth, it is less than fifty 
 years ago that the daughter of the man 
 who fiddled at Stoodley's and of the girl 
 who went barefooted and ragged through 
 the streets of Portsmouth, passed in her 
 turn to the Great Beyond. Verily, we in 
 America have, after all, only a short his- 
 torical perspective. 
 
 250 
 
A1ST HISTOKIC TEAGEDY 
 
 hundred years ago there was com- 
 mitted in Dedham, Massachusetts, 
 one of the most famous murders of 
 this country, a crime, some description of 
 which falls naturally enough into these 
 chapters, inasmuch as the person punished 
 as the criminal belonged to the illustrious 
 Fairbanks family, whose picturesque home- 
 stead is widely known as one of the oldest 
 houses in New England. 
 
 In the Massachusetts Federalist of 
 Saturday, September 12, 1801, we find 
 an editorial paragraph which, apart from 
 its intrinsic interest, is valuable as an 
 example of the great difference between 
 
 251 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 ancient and modern journalistic treatment 
 of murder matter. This paragraph reads, 
 in the quaint old type of the time: " On 
 Thursday last Jason Fairbanks was ex- 
 ecuted at Dedham for the murder of Miss 
 Elizabeth Fales. He was taken from the 
 gaol in this town at eight o'clock, by the 
 sheriff of this county, and delivered to the 
 sheriff of Norfolk County at the boundary 
 line between the two counties. 
 
 " He was in an open coach, and was 
 attended therein by the Reverend Doctor 
 Thatcher and two peace officers. From the 
 county line in Norfolk he was conducted 
 to the Dedham gaol by Sheriff Cutler, 
 his deputies, and a score of cavalry under 
 Captain Davis; and from the gaol in 
 Dedham to the place of execution was 
 guarded by two companies of cavalry and 
 a detachment of volunteer infantry. 
 
 " He mounted the scaffold about a 
 252 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 quarter before three with his usual steadi- 
 ness, and soon after making a signal with 
 his handkerchief, was swung off. After 
 hanging about twenty-five minutes, his 
 body was cut down and buried near the 
 gallows. His deportment during his 
 journey to and at the place of execution 
 was marked with the same apathy and 
 indifference which he discovered before 
 and since his trial. We do not learn he 
 has made any confession of his guilt." 
 
 As a matter of fact, far from making 
 a confession of his guilt, Jason Fairbanks 
 denied even to the moment of his execution 
 that he killed Elizabeth Fales, and his 
 family and many other worthy citizens 
 of Dedham believed, and kept believing to 
 the end of their lives, that the girl com- 
 mitted suicide, and that an innocent man 
 was punished for a crime he could never 
 have perpetrated. 
 
 253 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 In the trial it was shown that this beau- 
 tiful girl of eighteen had been for many 
 years extremely fond of the young man, 
 Fairbanks, and that her love was ardently 
 reciprocated. Jason Fairbanks had not 
 been allowed, however, to visit the girl 
 at the home of her father, though the 
 Fales place was only a little more than 
 a mile from his own dwelling, the vener- 
 able Fairbanks house. None the less, they 
 had been in the habit of meeting fre- 
 quently, in company with others, en route 
 to the weekly singing school, the husking 
 bees and the choir practice. Both the 
 young people were extremely fond of 
 music, and this mutual interest seems to 
 have been one of the several ties which 
 bound them together. 
 
 In spite, therefore, of the stern decree 
 that young Fairbanks should not visit Miss 
 Fales at her home, there was considerable 
 254 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND BOOFTREES 
 
 well-improved opportunity for intercourse, 
 and, as was afterward shown, the two often 
 had long walks together, apart from the 
 others of their acquaintance. One of their 
 appointments was made for the day of the 
 murder, May 18, 1801. Fairbanks was 
 to meet his sweetheart, he told a friend, 
 in the pasture near her home, and it was 
 his intention at that time to persuade her 
 to run away with him and be married. 
 Unfortunately for Fairbanks' s case at the 
 trial, it was shown that he told this same 
 friend that if Elizabeth Fales would not 
 run away with him he would do her harm. 
 And one other thing which militated 
 against the acquittal of the accused youth 
 was the fact that, as an inducement to the 
 girl to elope with him, Fairbanks showed 
 her a forged paper, upon which she ap- 
 peared to have declared legally her inten- 
 tion to marry him. 
 
 255 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 One tragic element of the whole affair 
 was the fact that Fairbanks had no definite 
 work and no assured means of support. 
 Young people of good family did not 
 marry a hundred years ago without think- 
 ing, and thinking to some purpose, of 
 what cares and expense the future might 
 bring them. The man, if he was an hon- 
 ourable man, expected always to have a 
 home for his wife, and since Fairbanks 
 was an invalid, " debilitated in his right 
 arm," as the phrasing of the time put it, 
 and had never been able to do his part of 
 the farm work, he had lived what his stern 
 forebears would have called an idle life, 
 and consequently utterly lacked the means 
 to marry. That he was something of a 
 spoiled child also developed at the trial, 
 which from the first went against the 
 young man because of the testimony of 
 the chums to whom he had confided his 
 256 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND BOOFTREES 
 
 intention to do Elizabeth Fales an injury 
 if she would not go to Wrentham and 
 marry him. 
 
 The prisoner's counsel were two very 
 clever young lawyers who afterward came 
 to be men of great distinction in Massa- 
 chusetts no others, in fact, than Harri- 
 son Gray Otis and John Lowell. These 
 men advanced very clever arguments to 
 show that Elizabeth Fales, maddened by a 
 love which seemed unlikely ever to end in 
 marriage, had seized from Jason the large 
 knife which he was using to mend a quill 
 pen as he walked to meet her, and with this 
 knife had inflicted upon herself the terri- 
 ble wounds, from the effect of which she 
 died almost instantaneously. The fact 
 that Jason was himself wounded in the 
 struggle was ingeniously utilised by the 
 defence to show that he had received mur- 
 derous blows from her hand, for the very 
 
 257 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 reason that he had attempted (unsuccess- 
 fully, inasmuch as his right arm was im- 
 paired) to wrest the mad girl's murderous 
 weapon from her. 
 
 The counsel also made much of the fact 
 that, though it was at midday and many 
 people were not far off, no screams were 
 heard. A vigorous girl like Elizabeth 
 Fales would not have submitted easily, 
 they held, to any such assault as was 
 charged. In the course of the trial a very 
 moving description of the sufferings such 
 a high-strung, ardent nature as this girl's 
 must have undergone, because of her hope- 
 less love, was used to show the reasons for 
 suicide. And following the habit of the 
 times, the lawyers turned their work to 
 moral ends by beseeching the parents in 
 the crowded court-room to exercise a 
 greater vigilance over the social life of 
 their young people, and so prevent the 
 258 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 possibility of their forming any such at- 
 tachment as had moved Elizabeth Fales 
 to take her own life. 
 
 Yet all this eloquent pleading was in 
 vain, for the court found Jason Fairbanks 
 guilty of murder and sentenced him to 
 be hanged. Erom the court-room he was 
 taken to the Dedham gaol, but on the night 
 of the seventeenth of August he was en- 
 abled to make his escape through the offices 
 of a number of men who believed him 
 innocent, and for some days he was at 
 liberty. At length, however, upon a reward 
 of one thousand dollars being offered for 
 his apprehension, he was captured near 
 Northampton, Massachusetts, which town 
 he had reached on his journey to Canada. 
 
 The gallows upon which " justice " ulti- 
 mately asserted itself is said to have been 
 constructed of a tree cut from the old 
 Fairbanks place. 
 
 259 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 The Fairbanks house is still standing, 
 having been occupied for almost two hun- 
 dred and seventy-five years by the same 
 family, which is now in the eighth genera- 
 tion of the name. The house is surrounded 
 by magnificent old elms, and was built by 
 Jonathan Fairbanks, who came from 
 Sowerby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 
 England, in 1633. The cupboards are 
 filled with choice china, and even the 
 Fairbanks cats, it is said, drink their milk 
 out of ancient blue saucers that would drive 
 a collector wild with envy. 
 
 The house is now (1902) the home of 
 Miss Rebecca Fairbanks, an old lady of sev- 
 enty-five years, who will occupy it through- 
 out her lifetime, although the place is con- 
 trolled by the Fairbanks Chapter of the 
 Daughters of the Revolution, who hold 
 their monthly meetings there. 
 
 The way in which this property was 
 260 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 acquired by the organisation named is in- 
 teresting recent history. Miss Rebecca 
 Fairbanks was obliged in 1895 to sell the 
 house to John Crowley, a real estate dealer 
 in Dedham. On April 3, 1897, Mrs. Nel- 
 son V. Titus, asked through the medium of 
 the press for four thousand, five hundred 
 dollars, necessary to purchase the house and 
 keep it as a historical relic. Almost imme- 
 diately Mrs. J. Amory Codman and Miss 
 Martha Codman sent a check for the sum 
 desired, and thus performed a double act 
 of beneficence. For it was now possible 
 to ensure to Miss Fairbanks a life tenancy 
 of the home of her fathers as well as to 
 keep for all time this picturesque place as 
 an example of early American architecture. 
 Hundreds of visitors now go every sum- 
 mer to see the interesting old house, which 
 stands nestling cosily in a grassy dell just 
 at the corner of East Street and the short 
 
 261 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 " Willow Road " across the meadows that 
 lie between East Street and Dedham. This 
 road is a " modern convenience," and its 
 construction was severely frowned upon by 
 the three old ladies who twenty years ago 
 lived together in the family homestead. 
 And though it made the road to the village 
 shorter by half than the old way, this had 
 no weight with the inflexible women who 
 had inherited from their long line of an- 
 cestors marked decision and firmness of 
 character. They protested against the 
 building of the road, and when it was built 
 in spite of their protests they declared they 
 would not use it, and kept their word. 
 Constant attendants of the old Congrega- 
 tional church in Dedham, they went per- 
 sistently by the longest way round rather 
 than tolerate the road to which they had 
 objected. 
 
 That their neighbours called them " set 
 262 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 in their ways " goes, of course, without 
 saying, but the women of the Fairbanks 
 family have ever been rigidly conscien- 
 tious, and the men a bit obstinate. For, 
 much as one would like to think the con- 
 trary true, one seems forced to believe 
 that it was obstinacy rather than innocency 
 which made Jason Fairbanks protest till 
 the hour of his death that he was being 
 unjustly punished. 
 
 
 263 
 
INVENTOB MORSE'S UNFUL- 
 FILLED AMBITION 
 
 rHE first house erected in Charles- 
 town after the destruction of the 
 village by fire in 1775 (the coup 
 d'etat which immediately followed the 
 battle of Bunker Hill, it will be remem- 
 bered), is that which is here given as the 
 birthplace of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, 
 the inventor of the electric telegraph. The 
 house is still standing at 203 Main Street, 
 and in the front chamber of the second 
 story, on the right of the front door of the 
 entrance, visitors still pause to render trib- 
 ute to the memory of the babe that there 
 drew his first breath on April 27, 1791. 
 264 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 It was, however, quite by accident that 
 the house became doubly famous, for it 
 was during the building of the parsonage, 
 Pastor Morse's proper home, that his little 
 son came to gladden his life. Reverend 
 Jedediah Morse became minister of the 
 First Parish Church on April 30, 1789, 
 the very date of Washington's inaugura- 
 tion in New York as President of the 
 United States, and two weeks later married 
 a daughter of Judge Samuel Breese, of 
 New York. Shortly afterward it was de- 
 termined to build a parsonage, and during 
 the construction of this dwelling Doctor 
 Morse accepted the hospitality of Mr. 
 Thomas Edes, who then owned the " old- 
 est " house. And work on the parsonage 
 being delayed beyond expectation, Mrs. 
 Morse's little son was born in the Edes 
 house. 
 
 Apropos of the brief residence of Doctor 
 
 265 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Morse in this house comes a quaint letter 
 from Reverend Jeremy Belknap, the staid 
 old doctor of divinity, and the founder of 
 the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
 which shows that girls over a hundred 
 years ago were quite as much interested 
 in young unmarried ministers as nice girls 
 ought ever to be. Two or three months 
 before the settlement of Mr. Morse in 
 Charlestown, Doctor Belknap wrote to his 
 friend, Ebenezer Hazard, of New York, 
 who was a relative of Judge Breese : 
 
 " You said in one of your late letters 
 that probably Charlestown people would 
 soon have to build a house for Mr. Morse. 
 I let this drop in a conversation with a 
 daughter of Mr. Carey, and in a day or 
 two it was all over Charlestown, and the 
 girls who had been setting their caps for 
 him are chagrined. I suppose it would 
 be something to Mr. Morse's advantage 
 266 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 in point of bands and handkerchiefs, if this 
 report could be contradicted; but if it 
 cannot, oh, how heavy will be the disap- 
 pointment. When a young clergyman set- 
 tles in such a town as Charlestown, there 
 is as much looking out for him as there is 
 for a thousand-dollar prize in a lottery; 
 and though the girls know that but one 
 can have him, yet ' who knows but I may 
 be that one ? ' " l 
 
 Doctor Morse's fame has been a good 
 deal obscured by that of his distinguished 
 son, but he seems none the less to have been 
 a good deal of a man, and it is perhaps no 
 wonder that the feminine portion of a 
 little place like Charlestown looked for- 
 ward with decided interest to his settling 
 among them. We can even fancy that 
 the girls of the sewing society studied 
 
 1 Drake's "Historic Fields and Mansions of Mid- 
 dlesex." Little, Brown & Co., publishers. 
 
 267 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EQOFTEEES 
 
 geography with ardour when they learned 
 who was to be their new minister. For 
 geography was Doctor Morse's passion ; he 
 was, indeed, the Alexis Frye of his period. 
 This interest in geography is said to have 
 been so tremendous with the man that once 
 being asked by his teacher at a Greek reci- 
 tation where a certain verb was found, he 
 replied, " On the coast of Africa." And 
 while he was a tutor at Yale the want of 
 geographies there induced him to prepare 
 notes for his pupils, to serve as text-books, 
 which he eventually printed. 
 
 Young Morse seconded his father's pas- 
 sion for geography by one as strongly 
 marked for drawing, and the blank margin 
 of his Virgil occupied far more of his 
 thoughts than the text. The inventor came 
 indeed only tardily to discover in which 
 direction his real talent lay. All his 
 youth he worshipped art and followed (at 
 268 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 considerable distance) his beloved mis- 
 tress. His penchant for painting, exhibi- 
 ted in much the same manner as Allston's, 
 his future master, did not meet with the 
 same encouragement 
 
 A caricature (founded upon some fracas 
 among the students at Yale), in which 
 the faculty were burlesqued, was seized 
 during Morse's student days, handed to 
 President Dwight, and the author, who 
 was no other than our young friend, called 
 up. The delinquent received a severe lec- 
 ture upon his waste of time, violation of 
 college laws, and filial disobedience, with- 
 out exhibiting any sign of contrition ; but 
 when at length Doctor Dwight said to him, 
 " Morse, you are no painter ; this is a 
 rude attempt, a complete failure," he was 
 touched to the quick, and could not keep 
 back the tears. 
 
 The canvas, executed by Morse at the 
 
 269 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 age of nineteen, of the landing of the Pil- 
 grims, which may be seen at the Charles- 
 town City Hall, is certainly not a master- 
 piece. Yet the lad was determined to learn 
 to paint, and to this end accompanied 
 Allston to Europe, where he became a pupil 
 of West, and, it is said, also of Copley. 
 West had become the foremost painter 
 of his time in England when our ambitious 
 young artist was presented to him, but from 
 the beginning he took a great interest in 
 the Charlestown lad, and showed him much 
 attention. Once in after years Morse rela- 
 ted to a friend this most interesting anec- 
 dote of his great master : " I called upon 
 Mr. West at his house in Newman Street 
 one morning, and in conformity to the 
 order given to his servant Robert always 
 to admit Mr. Leslie and myself even if he 
 was engaged in his private studies, I was 
 shown into his studio. 
 270 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 " As I entered a half-length portrait of 
 George III. stood before me on an easel, 
 and Mr. West was sitting with his back 
 toward me copying from it upon canvas. 
 My name having been mentioned to him, 
 he did not turn, but pointing with the 
 pencil he had in his hand to the portrait 
 from which he was copying, he said, ' Do 
 you see that picture, Mr. Morse ? ' 
 
 " ' Yes, sir/ I said, * I perceive it is the 
 portrait of the king.' 
 
 " ' Well/ said Mr. West, ' the king was 
 sitting to me for that portrait when the 
 box containing the American Declaration 
 of Independence was handed to him.' 
 
 " * Indeed,' I answered ; ' and what ap- 
 peared to be the emotions of the king? 
 What did he say ? ' 
 
 " ' His reply,' said Mr. West, f was char- 
 acteristic of the goodness of his heart : " If 
 they can be happier under the govern- 
 
 271 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 ment they have chosen than under me, I 
 shall be happy." ' " * 
 
 Morse returned to Boston in the autumn 
 of 1815, and there set up a studio. But 
 he was not too occupied in painting to 
 turn a hand to invention, and we find him 
 the next winter touring New Hampshire 
 and Vermont trying to sell to towns and vil- 
 lages a fire-engine pump he had invented, 
 while seeking commissions to paint por- 
 traits at fifteen dollars a head. It was that 
 winter that he met in Concord, New Hamp- 
 shire, Miss Lucretia P. Walker, whom he 
 married in the autumn of 1818, and whose 
 death in February, 1825, just after he 
 had successfully fulfilled a liberal com- 
 mission to paint General Lafayette, was 
 the great blow of his young manhood. 
 
 The National Academy of Design 
 
 1 Beacon Biographies : S. F. B. Morse, by John 
 Trowbridge ; Small, Maynard & Co. 
 
 272 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Morse helped to found in New York in 
 1826, and of this institution he was first 
 president. About the same time we find 
 him renewing his early interest in elec- 
 trical experiments. A few years later he is 
 sailing for Europe, there to execute many 
 copying commissions. And on his return 
 from this stay abroad the idea of the 
 telegraph suggested itself to him. 
 
 Of the exact way in which Morse first 
 conceived the idea of making electricity the 
 means of conveying intelligence, various 
 accounts have been given, the one usually 
 accepted being that while on board the 
 packet-ship Sully, a fellow passenger rela- 
 ted some experiments he had witnessed in 
 Paris with the electro-magnet, a recital 
 which made such an impression upon one 
 of his auditors that he walked the deck 
 the whole night. Professor Morse's own 
 statement was that he gained his knowledge 
 
 273 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 of the working of the electro-magnet while 
 attending the lectures of Doctor J. Free- 
 man Dana, then professor of chemistry in 
 the University of New York, lectures 
 which were delivered before the New York 
 Atheneum. 
 
 " I witnessed," says Morse, " the effects 
 of the conjunctive wires in the different 
 forms described by him in his lectures, 
 and exhibited to his audience. The electro- 
 magnet was put in action by an intense 
 battery ; it was made to sustain the weight 
 of its armature, when the conjunctive wire 
 was connected with the poles of the battery, 
 or the circuit was closed ; and it was made 
 to i drop its load ' upon opening the cir- 
 cuit." 
 
 Yet after the inventor had made his dis- 
 covery he had the greatest difficulty in 
 getting a chance to demonstrate its worth. 
 Heartsick with despondency, and with his 
 274 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 means utterly exhausted, he finally applied 
 to the Twenty-seventh Congress for aid to 
 put his invention to the test of practical 
 illustration, and his petition was carried 
 through with a majority of only two votes ! 
 These two votes to the good were enough, 
 however, to save the wonderful discovery, 
 perhaps from present obscurity, and with 
 the thirty thousand dollars appropriated by 
 Congress Morse stretched his first wires 
 from Washington to Baltimore wires, it 
 will be noted, because the principle of the 
 ground circuit was not then known, and 
 only later discovered by accident. So that 
 a wire to go and another to return between 
 the cities was deemed necessary by Morse 
 to complete his first circuit. The first wire 
 was of copper. 
 
 The first message, now in the custody of 
 the Connecticut Historical Society, was 
 dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and 
 
 275 
 
OLD XEW ENGLAND EOOFTBEES 
 
 the words of it were " What hath God 
 wrought ? " The telegraph was at first 
 regarded with superstitious dread in some 
 sections of the country. In a Southern 
 State a drought was attributed to its occult 
 influences, and the people, infatuated with 
 the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. 
 And so common was it for the Indians to 
 knock off the insulators with their rifles 
 in order to gratify their curiosity in regard 
 to the " singing cord/' that it was at first 
 extremely difficult to keep the lines in 
 repair along the Pacific Railway. 
 
 To the man who had been so poor that he 
 had had a very great struggle to provide 
 bread for his three motherless children, 
 came now success. The impecunious artist 
 was liberally rewarded for his clever in- 
 vention, and in 1847 he married for his 
 second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of 
 Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. 
 276 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 She was twenty-five when they were mar- 
 ried, and he fifty-six, but they lived very 
 happily together on the two-hundred acre 
 farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, 
 and it was there that he died at the age 
 of seventy-two, full of honours as an in- 
 ventor, and loving art to the end. 
 
 Even after he became a great man, Pro- 
 fessor Morse, it is interesting to learn, 
 cherished his fondness for the house in 
 which he was born, and one of his last 
 visits to Charlestown was on the occasion 
 when he took his young daughter to see 
 the old place. And that same day, one is 
 a bit amused to note, he took her also 
 to the old parsonage, then still standing, 
 in what is now Harvard Street, between 
 the city hall and the church and there 
 pointed out to her with pride some rude 
 sketches he had made on the wall of his 
 sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though 
 
 277 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 it is as an inventor we remember and 
 honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse to- 
 day, it was as a painter that he wished 
 first, last, and above all to be famous. But 
 in the realm of the talents as elsewhere 
 man proposes and God disposes. 
 
 278 
 
WHEKE THE " BEOTHEKS AND 
 SISTERS" MET 
 
 Tt TO single house in all Massachusetts 
 / ^ has survived so many of the vicis- 
 situdes of fickle fortune and car- 
 ried the traditions of a glorious past up 
 into the realities of a prosperous and useful 
 present more successfully than has Fay 
 House, the present home of Radcliffe Col- 
 lege, Cambridge. The central portion of 
 the Fay House of to-day dates back nearly 
 a hundred years, and was built by 
 Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous merchant 
 of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to 
 make farmer-folk stare when, with its 
 
 279 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 tower-like bays, running from ground to 
 roof, it was, in 1806, erected on the high- 
 road to Watertown, the first brick house 
 in the vicinity. 
 
 To Mr. Ireland did not come the good 
 fortune of living in the fine dwelling his 
 ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith 
 by trade, his prospects were ruined by the 
 Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to 
 leave the work of construction on his house 
 unfinished and allow the place to pass, 
 heavily mortgaged, into the hands of 
 others. But the house itself and our story 
 concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss, 
 for it now became the property of Doctor 
 Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard in- 
 structor), and the rendezvous of that pro- 
 fessor's college associates and of the numer- 
 ous friends of his young family. Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes was among those who 
 
 280 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 spent many a social evening here with the 
 McKeans. 
 
 The next name of importance to be con- 
 nected with Fay House was that of 
 Edward Everett, who lived here for a time. 
 Later Sophia Willard Dana, granddaugh- 
 ter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minis- 
 ter to Russia, kept a boarding and day 
 school for young ladies in the house. 
 Among her pupils were the sisters of 
 James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing, the 
 first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth 
 Higginson, and members of the Higgin- 
 son, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. 
 Lowell himself, and Edmund Dana, at- 
 tended here for a term as a special privi- 
 lege. Sophia Dana was married in the 
 house, August 22, 1827, by the father of 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, to Mr. George 
 Ripley, with whom she afterward took an 
 active part in the Brook Farm Colony, of 
 
 281 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 which we are to hear again a bit later in 
 this series. After Miss Dana's marriage, 
 her school was carried on largely by Miss 
 Elizabeth McKean the daughter of the 
 Doctor Joseph McKean already referred 
 to a young woman who soon became the 
 wife of Doctor Joseph Worcester, the com- 
 piler of the dictionary. 
 
 Delightful reminiscences of Fay House 
 have been furnished us by Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson, who, as a boy, was often 
 in and out of the place, visiting his aunt, 
 Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her 
 son, William Henry Channing, the well- 
 known anti-slavery orator. Here Higgin- 
 son, as a youth, used to listen with keenest 
 pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy 
 Channing, especially when the song she 
 chose was, " The Mistletoe Hung on the 
 Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut 
 up in a chest. " I used firmly to believe," 
 282 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe 
 girls, in reviving for them his memories 
 of the house, " that there was a bride shut 
 up in the walls of this house and there 
 may be to-day, for all I know." 
 
 For fifty years after June, 1835, the 
 house was in the possession of Judge P. P. 
 Fay's family. The surroundings were still 
 country-like. Cambridge Common was as 
 yet only a treeless pasture, and the house 
 had not been materially changed from its 
 original shape and plan. Judge Fay was 
 a jolly gentleman of the old school. A 
 judge of probate for a dozen years, an 
 overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar 
 of Christ Church, he was withal fond of 
 a well-turned story and a lover of good 
 hunting, as well as much given to hospi- 
 tality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose 
 memory is now perpetuated in a Radcliffe 
 scholarship, was the sixth of Judge Fay's 
 
 283 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETEEES 
 
 seven children, and the one who finally 
 became both mistress and owner of the 
 estate. A girl of fourteen when her father 
 bought the house, she was at the time re- 
 ceiving her young-lady education at the 
 Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine- 
 covered, red-brick convent on the summit 
 of Charlestown, she learned, under the 
 guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the 
 piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak 
 French, and read Spanish and Italian. 
 But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly 
 terminated when the convent was burned. 
 So she entered earlier than would other- 
 wise have been the case upon the varied 
 interests of her new and beautiful home. 
 Here, in the course of a few years, we find 
 her presiding, a gracious and lovely 
 maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel 
 Higginson has said : " I have never, in 
 looking back, felt more grateful to any 
 284 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 one than to this charming girl of twenty, 
 who consented to be a neighbour to me, an 
 awkward boy of seventeen, to attract me in 
 a manner from myself and make me avail- 
 able to other people." 
 
 Very happy times were those which the 
 young Went worth Higginson, then a col- 
 lege boy, living with his mother at 
 Vaughan House, was privileged to share 
 with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of 
 us does not envy him the memory of that 
 Christmas party in 1841, when there were 
 gathered in Fay House, among others, 
 Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancee; 
 Levi Thaxter, afterward the husband of 
 Celia Thaxter ; Leverett Saltonstall, Mary 
 Story and William Story, the sculptors? 
 And how pleasant it must have been to join 
 in the famous charades of that circle of 
 talented young people, to partake of re- 
 freshments in the quaint dining-room, and 
 
 285 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 dance a Virginia reel and galop in the 
 beautiful oval parlour which then, as to- 
 day, expressed ideally the acme of charm- 
 ing hospitality ! What tales this same par- 
 lour might relate! How enchantingly it 
 might tell, if it could speak, of the graceful 
 Maria White, who, seated in the deep win- 
 dow, must have made an exquisite picture 
 in her white gown, with her beautiful face 
 shining in the moonlight while she re- 
 peated, in her soft voice, one of her own 
 ballads, written for the " Brothers and 
 Sisters," as this group of young people 
 was called. 
 
 Of a more distinctly academic cast were 
 some of the companies later assembled in 
 this same room Judge Story, Doctor 
 Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, 
 Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe 
 Longfellow, listening to one of his own 
 songs, or that strange figure, Professor 
 286 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly 
 ill at ease in his suit of dingy black. In 
 his younger days he had been both pirate 
 and priest, and he retained, as professor, 
 some of his early habits seldom being 
 seated while he talked, and leaning against 
 the door, shaking and fumbling his college 
 keys as the monks shake their rosaries. 
 Mr. Arthur Oilman has related in a charm- 
 ing article on Fay House, written for 
 the Harvard Graduates Magazine (from 
 which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the 
 old place, printed in a recent number of 
 the Radcliffe Magazine, many of the inci- 
 dents here given are drawn), that Professor 
 Sophocles was allowed by Miss Fay to keep 
 some hens on the estate, pets which he had 
 an odd habit of naming after his friends. 
 When, therefore, some accomplishment 
 striking and praiseworthy in a hen was 
 related in company as peculiar to one or 
 
 287 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 another of them, the professor innocently 
 calling his animals by the name he had 
 borrowed, the effect was apt to be start- 
 ling. 
 
 During the latter part of Miss Fay's 
 long tenancy of this house, she had with 
 her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. 
 Greenough, a woman who had been so 
 famous a beauty in her youth that, on the 
 occasion of her wedding, Harvard students 
 thronged the aisles and climbed the pews 
 of old Christ Church to see her. The wed- 
 ding receptions of Mrs. Greenough's daugh- 
 ter and granddaughter were held, too, in 
 Fay House. This latter girl was the fas- 
 cinating and talented Lily Greenough, who 
 was later a favourite at the court of Napo- 
 leon and Eugenie, and who, after the death 
 of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, 
 was married in this house to Monsieur 
 De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that time 
 288 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Danish Minister to the United States, and 
 now minister at Paris. Her daughter, 
 Suzanne Moulton, who has left her name 
 scratched with a diamond on one of the 
 Fay House windows, is now the Countess 
 Suzanne Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Den- 
 mark. 
 
 In connection with the Fays' life in this 
 house occurred one thing which will par- 
 ticularly send the building down into pos- 
 terity, and will link for all time Radcliffe 
 and Harvard traditions. For it was in 
 the upper corner room, nearest the Wash- 
 ington Elm, that Doctor Samuel Oilman, 
 Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote " Fair 
 Harvard," while a guest in this hospitable 
 home, during the second centennial cele- 
 bration of the college on the Charles. Rad- 
 cliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as 
 they point out to visitors this room and 
 its facsimile copy of the famous song. Yet 
 
 289 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 they have plenty of pleasant things of their 
 own to remember. 
 
 Just one of these, taken at random from 
 among the present writer's own memories 
 of pretty happenings at Fay House, will 
 serve : During Duse's last tour in this coun- 
 try, the famous actress came out one after- 
 noon, as many a famous personage does, 
 to drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Agassiz 
 in the stately old parlour, where Mrs. 
 Whitman's famous portrait of the presi- 
 dent of Radcliffe College vies in attract- 
 iveness with the living reality graciously 
 presiding over the Wednesday afternoon 
 teacups. As it happened, there was a scant 
 attendance at the tea on this day of Duse's 
 visit. She had not been expected, and so 
 it fell out that some two or three girls who 
 could speak French or Italian were priv- 
 ileged to do the honours of the occasion 
 to the great actress whom they had long 
 290 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 worshipped from afar. Duse was in one 
 of her most charming moods, and she 
 listened with the greatest attention to her 
 young hostesses' laboured explanations 
 concerning the college and its ancient 
 home. 
 
 The best of it all, from the enthusiastic 
 girl-students 7 point of view, was, however, 
 in the dark-eyed Italienne's mode of say- 
 ing farewell. As she entered her carriage 
 - to which she had been escorted by this 
 little group she took from her belt a 
 beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias, and 
 violets. And as the smart coachman 
 flicked the impatient horses with his whip, 
 Duse threw the girls the precious flowers. 
 Those who caught a camellia felt, of 
 course, especially delighted, for it was as 
 the Dame aux Camellias that Duse had 
 been winning for weeks the plaudits of ad- 
 miring Boston. My own share of the 
 
 291 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 largesse consisted of a few fresh, sweet 
 violets, which I still have tucked away 
 somewhere, together with one of the great 
 actress's photographs that bears the date 
 of the pleasant afternoon hour passed with 
 her in the parlour where the " Brothers 
 and Sisters " met 
 
 292 
 
THE BEOOK EAEMEES 
 
 of the weddings noted in our 
 Fay House chapter was that of 
 Sophia Dana to George Eipley, an 
 event which was celebrated August 22, 
 1827, in the stately parlour of the Cam- 
 bridge mansion, the ceremony being per- 
 formed by the father of Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes. The time between the date of 
 their marriage and the year 1840, when 
 Mr. and Mrs. Eipley " discovered " the 
 milk-farm in West Eoxbury, which was 
 afterward to be developed through their 
 efforts into the most remarkable socialistic 
 experiment America has ever known, 
 
 293 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 represented for the young people joined 
 together in what is now the home of Kad- 
 cliffe College some dozen years of quiet 
 parsonage life in Boston. 
 
 The later years of George Ripley's life 
 held for him a series of disappointments 
 before which his courage and ideals never 
 failed. When the young student left the 
 Harvard Divinity School, he was appointed 
 minister over a Unitarian parish which 
 was gathered for him at the corner of 
 Pearl and Purchase Streets, Boston. Here 
 his ministrations went faithfully on, but 
 inasmuch as his parishioners failed to take 
 any deep interest in the social questions 
 which seemed to him of most vital concern, 
 he sent them, in the October of 1840, a 
 letter of resignation, which they duly ac- 
 cepted, thus leaving Ripley free to enter 
 upon the experiment so dear to him. 
 
 The Ripleys, as has been said, had al- 
 294 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 ready discovered Brook Farm, a pleasant 
 place, varied in contour, with pine woods 
 close at hand, the Charles River within 
 easy distance, and plenty of land - 
 whether of a sort to produce paying crops 
 or not they were later to learn. That win- 
 ter Ripley wrote to Emerson : " We pro- 
 pose to take a small tract of land, which, 
 under skilful husbandry, uniting the gar- 
 den and the farm, will be adequate to the 
 subsistence of the families ; and to connect 
 with this a school or college in which the 
 most complete instruction shall be given, 
 from the first rudiments to the highest 
 culture." Ripley himself assumed the 
 responsibility for the management and 
 success of the undertaking, and about the 
 middle of April, 1841, he took possession 
 with his wife and sister and some fifteen 
 others, including Hawthorne, of the f arm- 
 
 295 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 house, which, with a large barn, was 
 already on the estate. 
 
 The first six months were spent in " get- 
 ting started," especially in the matter of 
 the school, of which Mrs. Ripley was 
 largely in charge, and it was not until 
 early fall September 29 that the 
 Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and 
 Education was organised as a kind of joint 
 stock company, not incorporated. 
 
 A seeker after country quiet and beauty 
 might easily be as much attracted to-day 
 by the undulating acres of Brook Farm 
 as were those who sought it sixty years 
 ago as a refuge from social discouragement. 
 The brook still babbles cheerily as it 
 threads its way through the meadows, and 
 there are still pleasant pastures and shady 
 groves on the large estate. The only one 
 of the community buildings which is still 
 standing, however, is that now known as 
 296 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 the Martin Luther Orphan Home. This 
 house was built at the very start of the 
 community life by Mrs. A. G. Alford, one 
 of the members of the colony. 
 
 The building was in the form of a Mal- 
 tese cross with four gables, the central space 
 being taken by the staircase. It contained 
 only about half a dozen rooms, and proba- 
 bly could not have accommodated more 
 than that number of residents. It is said 
 to have been the prettiest and best fur- 
 nished house on the place, but an examina- 
 tion of its simple construction will confirm 
 the memory of one of its occupants, who re- 
 marked that contact with nature was here 
 always admirably close and unaffected. 
 From the rough dwelling, which resembled 
 an inexpensive beach cottage, to out-doors 
 was hardly a transition, it is chronicled, 
 and at all seasons the external and internal 
 temperatures closely corresponded. Until 
 
 297 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 lately the cottage wore its original dark- 
 brown colour ; and it is still the best visible 
 remnant of the early days, and gives a 
 pleasant impression of what the daily life 
 of the association must have been. 
 
 Gay and happy indeed were the dwellers 
 in this community during the early stages 
 of its development. Kipley's theory of the 
 wholesomeness of combined manual and 
 intellectual work ruled everywhere. He 
 himself donned the farmer's blouse, the 
 wide straw hat, and the high boots in which 
 he has been pictured at Brook Farm ; and 
 whether he cleaned stables, milked cows, 
 carried vegetables to market, or taught 
 philosophy and discussed religion, he was 
 unfailingly cheerful and inspiring. 
 
 Mrs. Ripley was in complete accord with 
 
 her husband on all vital questions, and as 
 
 the chief of the Wash-Koom Group worked 
 
 blithely eight or ten hours a day. Whether 
 
 298 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 this devotion to her husband's ideals grew 
 out of her love for him, or whether she 
 was really persuaded of the truth of his 
 theory, does not appear. In later life it is 
 interesting to learn that she sought in the 
 Church of Rome the comfort which Rip- 
 ley's transcendentalism was not able to 
 afford her. When she died in 1859 she had 
 held the faith of Rome for nearly a dozen 
 years, and, curiously enough, was buried 
 as a Catholic from that very building in 
 which her husband had preached as a 
 Unitarian early in their married life, the 
 church having in the interim been pur- 
 chased by the Catholics. With just one 
 glimpse of the later Ripley himself, we 
 must leave this interesting couple. In 
 1866, when, armed with a letter of intro- 
 duction from Emerson, the original Brook 
 Earmer sought Carlyle (who had once de- 
 scribed him as " a Socinian minister who 
 
 299 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 had left his pulpit to reform the world 
 by cultivating onions"), and Carlyle 
 greeted him with a long and violent tirade 
 against our government, Ripley sat quietly 
 through it all, but when the sage of Chelsea 
 paused for breath, calmly rose and left the 
 house, saying no word of remonstrance. 
 
 It is, of course, however, in Hawthorne 
 and his descriptions in the " Blithedale 
 Romance " of the life at Brook Farm that 
 the principal interest of most readers cen- 
 tres. This work has come to be regarded 
 as the epic of the community, and it is 
 now generally conceded that Hawthorne 
 was in this novel far more of a realist 
 than was at first admitted. He did not 
 avoid the impulse to tell the happenings 
 of life at the farm pretty nearly as he 
 found them, and substantial as the charac- 
 ters may or may not be, the daily life and 
 doings, the scenery, the surroundings, and 
 300 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 even trivial details are presented with a 
 well-nigh faultless accuracy. 
 
 The characters, as I have said, are not 
 easily traceable, but even in this respect 
 Hawthorne was something of a photog- 
 rapher. Zenobia seems a blend of Mar- 
 garet Fuller and of Mrs. Barlow, who as 
 Miss Penniman was once a famous Brook- 
 line beauty of lively and attractive dispo- 
 sition. In the strongest and most repel- 
 laiit character of the novel, Hollingsworth, 
 Hawthorne seems to have incorporated 
 something of the fierce earnestness of 
 Brownson and the pathetic zeal of Kipley. 
 And those who best know Brook Farm are 
 able to find in the book reflections of other 
 well-known members of the community. 
 For the actual life of the place, however, 
 readers cannot do better than peruse 
 Lindsay Swift's recent delightful work, 
 
 301 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 " Brook Earm, Its Members, Scholars, and 
 Visitors." 
 
 There was, we learn here, a charming 
 happy-go-luckiness about the whole life. 
 Partly from necessity, partly from choice, 
 the young people used to sit on the stairs 
 and on the floor during the evening enter- 
 tainments. Dishes were washed and wiped 
 to the tune of " Oh, Canaan, Bright Ca- 
 naan/ 7 or some other song of the time. 
 When about their work the women wore 
 short skirts with knickerbockers; the 
 water-cure and the starving-cure both re- 
 ceived due attention at the hands of some 
 of the members of the household ; at table 
 the customary formula was, " Is the butter 
 within the sphere of your influence ? " 
 And very often the day's work ended in a 
 dance, a walk to Eliot's Pulpit, or a moon- 
 light hour on the Charles ! 
 
 During the earlier years the men, who 
 302 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 were in excess of the young women in 
 point of numbers, helped very largely in 
 the household labours. George William 
 Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles 
 Dana, who afterward founded the New 
 York Sun, organised a band of griddle- 
 cake servitors composed of " four of the 
 most elegant youths of the Community ! " 
 One legend, which has the air of prob- 
 ability, records that a student confessed his 
 passion while helping his sweetheart at 
 the sink. Of love there was indeed not a 
 little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to 
 have made much havoc in the Community, 
 and though very little mismating is to be 
 traced to the intimacy of the life there, 
 fourteen marriages have been attributed to 
 friendships begun at Brook Farm, and 
 there was even one wedding there, that of 
 John Orvis to John Dwight's sister, 
 Marianne. At this simple ceremony Will- 
 
 303 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 iam Henry Charming was the minister, 
 and John Dwight made a speech of exactly 
 five words. 
 
 Starting with about fifteen persons, the 
 numbers at the farm increased rapidly, 
 though never above one hundred and twenty 
 people were there at a time. It is estimated, 
 however, that about two hundred individ- 
 uals were connected with the Community 
 from first to last. Of these all the well- 
 known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, 
 one is to count among the " Farmers " 
 Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very 
 young girl was a teacher in the infant 
 department of the school. 
 
 Yet though the Farmers have almost 
 all passed beyond, delicious anecdotes 
 about them are all the time coming to light. 
 There is one story of "Sam" Lamed which 
 is almost too good to be true. Larned, it 
 is said, steadily refused to drink milk on 
 304 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTEEES 
 
 the ground that his relations with the cow 
 did not justify him in drawing on her 
 reserves, and when it was pointed out to 
 him that he ought on the same principle 
 to abandon shoes, he is said to have made 
 a serious attempt to discover some more 
 moral type of footwear. 
 
 And then there is another good story 
 of an instance when Brook Farm hos- 
 pitality had fatal results. An Irish 
 baronet, Sir John Caldwell, fifth of that 
 title, and treasurer-general at Canada, 
 after supping with the Community on its 
 greatest delicacy, pork and beans, returned 
 to the now departed Tremont House in 
 Boston, and died suddenly of apoplexy ! 
 
 This baronet's son was wont later to 
 refer to the early members of the Commu- 
 nity as " extinct volcanoes of transcen- 
 dental nonsense and humbuggery." But 
 no witty sallies of this sort are able to 
 
 305 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 lessen in the popular mind the reverence 
 with which this Brook Farm essay in 
 idealism must ever be held. For this 
 Community, when all is said, remains the 
 most successful and the most interesting 
 failure the world has ever known. 
 
 306 
 
MARGARET FULLER: MARCHESA 
 D'OSSOLI 
 
 account of Brook Farm which 
 should neglect to dwell upon the 
 part played in the community life 
 by Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, 
 would be almost like the play of " Ham- 
 let " with the Prince of Denmark left out. 
 For although Margaret Fuller never lived 
 at Brook Farm was, indeed, only an 
 occasional visitor there her influence 
 pervaded the place, and, as we feel from 
 reading the " Blithedale Romance," she 
 was really, whether absent or present, the 
 strongest personality connected with the 
 experiment. 
 
 307 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Hawthorne's first bucolic experience was 
 with the famous " transcendental heifer " 
 mistakenly said to have been the property 
 of Margaret Fuller. As a matter of fact, 
 the beast had been named after Cambridge's 
 most intellectual woman, by Ripley, who 
 had a whimsical fashion of thus honouring 
 his friends. According to Hawthorne, the 
 name in this case was not inapt, for the 
 cow was so recalcitrant and anti-social that 
 it was finally sent to Coventry by the more 
 docile kine, always to be counted on for 
 moderate conservatism. 
 
 This cow's would-be-tamer, not wishing 
 to be unjust, refers to this heifer as having 
 " a very intelligent face " and " a reflective 
 cast of character." He certainly paid Mar- 
 garet Fuller herself no such tribute, but 
 thus early in his Brook Farm experience 
 let appear his thinly veiled contempt for 
 the high priestess of transcendentalism. 
 308 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 Even earlier his antagonism toward this 
 eminent woman was strong, if it was not 
 frank, for he wrote : "I was invited to 
 dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss 
 Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given 
 me some business to do for which I was 
 very thankful." 
 
 The unlovely side of Margaret Fuller 
 must have made a very deep impression 
 upon Hawthorne. Gentle as the great ro- 
 mancer undoubtedly was by birth and 
 training, he has certainly been very harsh 
 in writing, both in his note-book and in his 
 story of Brook Farm, of the woman we rec- 
 ognise in Zenobia. One of the most inter- 
 esting literary wars ever carried on in this 
 vicinity, indeed, was that which was waged 
 here some fifteen years ago concerning 
 Julian Hawthorne's revelations of his 
 father's private opinion of the Marchesa 
 d'Ossoli. The remarks in question oc- 
 
 309 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 curred in the great Hawthorne's " Koman 
 Journal," and were certainly sufficiently 
 scathing to call for such warm defence 
 as Margaret's surviving friends hastened 
 to offer. Hawthorne said among other 
 things : 
 
 " Margaret Fuller had a strong and 
 coarse nature which she had done her ut- 
 most to refine, with infinite pains ; but, of 
 course, it could be only superficially 
 changed. . . . Margaret has not left in the 
 hearts and minds of those who knew her 
 any deep witness of her integrity and 
 purity. She was a great humbug of 
 course, with much talent and moral reality, 
 or else she could never have been so great 
 a humbug. . . . Toward the last there ap- 
 pears to have been a total collapse in poor 
 Margaret, morally and intellectually; 
 and tragic as her catastrophe was, Provi- 
 dence was, after all, kind in putting her 
 310 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 and her clownish husband and their child 
 on board that fated ship. . . . On the 
 whole, I do not know but I like her 
 the better, though, because she proved her- 
 self a very woman after all, and fell as the 
 meanest of her sisters might." 
 
 The latter sentences refer to Margaret's 
 marriage to Ossoli, a man some ten years 
 the junior of his gifted wife, and by no 
 means her intellectual equal. That the 
 marriage was a strange one even Mar- 
 garet's most ardent friends admit, but it 
 was none the less exceedingly human and 
 very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a 
 woman of thirty-seven, whose interests had 
 long been of the strictly intellectual kind, 
 to yield herself at last to the impulses of 
 an affectionate nature. 
 
 But we are getting very much ahead of 
 our story, which should begin, of course, 
 far back in May, 1810, when there was 
 
 311 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 born, at the corner of Eaton and Cherry 
 Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter 
 to Timothy Fuller and his wife. The 
 dwelling in which Margaret first saw the 
 light still stands, and is easily recognised 
 by the three elms in front, planted by the 
 proud father to celebrate the advent of his 
 first child. 
 
 The garden in which Margaret and her 
 mother delighted has long since vanished ; 
 but the house still retains a certain dignity, 
 though now divided into three separate 
 tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, 
 and 75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a 
 rather migratory class of tenants. The 
 pillared doorway and the carved wreaths 
 above it still give an old-fashioned grace 
 to the somewhat dilapidated house. 
 
 The class with which Margaret may be 
 said to have danced through Harvard Col- 
 lege was that of 1829, which has been 
 812 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 made by the wit and poetry of Holmes the 
 most eminent class that ever left Harvard. 
 The memory of one lady has preserved for 
 us a picture of the girl Margaret as she 
 appeared at a ball when she was sixteen. 
 
 " She had a very plain face, half -shut 
 eyes, and hair curled all over her head; 
 she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck 
 pink silk, with white muslin over it; and 
 she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, 
 being withal so near-sighted that she could 
 hardly see her partner." 
 
 With Holmes she was not especially in- 
 timate, we learn, though they had been 
 schoolmates ; but with two of the most con- 
 spicuous members of the class William 
 Henry Channing and James Freeman 
 Clarke she formed a lifelong friendship, 
 and these gentlemen became her biog- 
 raphers. 
 
 Yet, after all, the most important part 
 
 313 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 of a woman's training is that which she 
 obtains from her own sex, and of this Mar- 
 garet Fuller had quite her share. She was 
 one of those maidens who form passion- 
 ate attachments to older women, and there 
 were many Cambridge ladies of the college 
 circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty. 
 
 " My elder sister," writes Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson, in his biography of 
 Margaret Fuller, " can well remember this 
 studious, self-conscious, over-grown girl as 
 sitting at my mother's feet, covering her 
 hands with kisses, and treasuring her every 
 word. It was the same at other times with 
 other women, most of whom were too much 
 absorbed in their own duties to give more 
 than a passing solicitude to this rather 
 odd and sometimes inconvenient adorer." 
 
 The side of Margaret Fuller to which 
 scant attention has been paid heretofore 
 is this ardently affectionate side, and this 
 314 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 it is which seems to account for what has 
 always before appeared inexplicable her 
 romantic marriage to the young Marchese 
 d'Ossoli. The intellect was in truth only 
 a small part of Margaret, and if Haw- 
 thorne had improved, as he might have 
 done, his opportunities to study the whole 
 nature of the woman, he would not have 
 written even for his private diary the harsh 
 sentences already quoted. One has only 
 to look at the heroic fashion in which, 
 after the death of her father, Margaret 
 took up the task of educating her brothers 
 and sisters to feel that there was much 
 besides selfishness in this woman's make- 
 up. 'Nor can one believe that Emerson 
 would ever have cared to have for the 
 friend of a lifetime a woman who was 
 a "humbug." Of Margaret's school- 
 teaching, conversation classes on West 
 Street, Boston, and labours on the Dial, a 
 
 315 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 transcendental paper in which Emerson 
 was deeply interested, there is not space to 
 speak here. But one phase of her work 
 which cannot be ignored is that performed 
 on the Tribune, in the days of Horace 
 Greeley. 
 
 Greeley brought Boston's high priestess 
 to New York for the purpose of putting 
 the literary criticism of the Tribune on a 
 higher plane than any American newspa- 
 per then occupied, as well as that she might 
 discuss in a large and stimulating way 
 all philanthropic questions. That she rose 
 to the former opportunity her enemies 
 would be the first to grant, but only those 
 who, like Margaret herself, believe in the 
 sisterhood of women could freely endorse 
 her attitude on philanthropic subjects. 
 
 Surely, though, it could not have been 
 a hard woman of whom Horace Greeley 
 wrote : "If she had been born to large 
 316 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTBEES 
 
 fortune, a house of refuge for all female 
 outcasts desiring to return to the ways of 
 virtue would have been one of her most 
 cherished and first realised conceptions. 
 She once attended, with other noble women, 
 a gathering of outcasts of their sex, and, 
 being asked how they appeared to her, 
 replied, { As women like myself, save that 
 they are victims of wrong and misfor- 
 tune.' " 
 
 While labouring for the Tribune., Mar- 
 garet Fuller was all the time saving her 
 money for the trip to Europe, which had 
 her life long been her dream of felicity; 
 and at last, on the first of August, 1846, 
 she sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, 
 in December, 1847, she was secretly mar- 
 ried, and in September, 1848, her child 
 was born. What these experiences must 
 have meant to her we are able to guess 
 from a glimpse into her private journal 
 
 317 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 in which she had many years before re- 
 corded her profoundest feeling about mar- 
 riage and motherhood. 
 
 " I have no home. No one loves me. 
 But I love many a good deal, and see 
 some way into their eventful beauty. . . . 
 I am myself growing better, and shall by 
 and by be a worthy object of love, one that 
 will not anywhere disappoint or need 
 forbearance. ... I have no child, and the 
 woman in me has so craved this experience 
 that it has seemed the want of it must 
 paralyse me. . . ." 
 
 The circumstances under which Mar- 
 garet Fuller and her husband first met are 
 full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's 
 arrival in "Rome, early in 1847, she went 
 one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and 
 becoming separated from her friends after 
 the service, she was noted as she examined 
 the church by a young man of gentlemanly 
 318 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 address, who, perceiving her discomfort 
 and her lack of Italian, offered his services 
 as a guide in her endeavour to find her 
 companions. 
 
 Not seeing them anywhere, the young 
 Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he, accom- 
 panied Miss Fuller home, and they met 
 once or twice again before she left Rome 
 for the summer. The following season 
 Miss Fuller had an apartment in Rome, 
 and she often received among her guests 
 this young patriot with whose labours in 
 behalf of his native city she was thoroughly 
 in sympathy. 
 
 When the young man after a few months 
 declared his love, Margaret refused to 
 marry him, insisting that he should choose 
 a younger woman for his wife. " In this 
 way it rested for some weeks/' writes Mrs. 
 Story, who knew them both, " during which 
 we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and unhappy. 
 
 319 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 He was always with Margaret, but in a 
 sort of hopeless, desperate manner, until 
 at length he convinced her of his love, 
 and she married him." 
 
 Then followed the wife's service in the 
 hospitals while Ossoli was in the army 
 outside the city. After the birth of their 
 child, Angelo, the happy little family went 
 to Florence. 
 
 The letters which passed between the 
 young nobleman and the wife he adored 
 are still extant, having been with the body 
 of her beautiful baby the only things of 
 Margaret Fuller's saved from the fatal 
 wreck in which she and her two loved ones 
 were lost. One of these letters will be 
 enough to show the tenderness of the man : 
 
 " HOME, 21 October, 1848. 
 " MIA CARA : I learn by yours of the 
 20th that you have received the ten scudi, 
 320 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 and it makes me more tranquil. I feel also 
 Mogliani's indolence in not coming to in- 
 oculate our child ; bui, my love, I pray you 
 not to disturb yourself so much, and not to 
 be sad, hoping that our dear love will be 
 guarded by God, and will be free from all 
 misfortunes. He will keep the child for 
 us and give us the means to sustain him." 
 
 In answer to this letter, or one like it, 
 we find the woman whom Hawthorne had 
 deemed hard and cold writing : 
 
 " Saturday Evening, 
 
 " 28 October, 1848. 
 
 "... It rains very hard every day, but 
 to-day I have been more quiet, and our 
 darling has been so good, I have taken 
 so much pleasure in being with him. When 
 he smiles in his sleep, how it makes my 
 heart beat! He has grown fat and very 
 fair, and begins to play and spring. You 
 
 321 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 will have much pleasure in seeing him 
 
 again. He sends you many kisses. He 
 
 bends his head toward me when he asks 
 a kiss." 
 
 Both Madame Ossoli and her husband 
 were very fearful as they embarked on the 
 fated ship which was to take them to 
 America. He had been cautioned by one 
 who had told his fortune when a boy to 
 beware of the sea, and his wife had long 
 cherished a superstition that the year 1850 
 would be a marked epoch in her life. It 
 is remarkable that in writing to a friend 
 of her fear Madame Ossoli said : " I pray 
 that if we are lost it may be brief anguish, 
 and Ossoli, the babe, and I go together." 
 
 They sailed none the less, May 17, 1850, 
 
 on the Elizabeth, a new merchant vessel, 
 
 which set out from Leghorn. Misfortune 
 
 soon began. The captain sickened and 
 
 322 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 died of malignant smallpox, and after his 
 burial at sea and a week's detention at 
 Gibraltar, little Angelo caught the dread 
 disease and was restored with difficulty. 
 Yet a worse fate was to follow. 
 
 At noon of July 18, while they were off 
 the coast of New Jersey, there was a gale, 
 followed by a hurricane, which dashed the 
 ship on that Fire Island Beach which has 
 engulfed so many other vessels. Margaret 
 Fuller and her husband were drowned with 
 their child. The bodies of the parents 
 were never recovered, but that of little 
 Angelo was buried in a seaman's chest 
 among the sandhills, from which it was 
 later disinterred and brought to our own 
 Mount Auburn by the relatives who had 
 never seen the baby in life. 
 
 And there to-day in a little green grave 
 rests the child of this great woman's great 
 love. 
 
 323 
 
THE OLD MANSE AND SOME OF 
 ITS MOSSES 
 
 "^ m 7 HE Old Manse," writes Haw- 
 f thorne, in his charming intro- 
 duction to the quaint stories, 
 " Mosses from an Old Manse/ 7 " had never 
 been profaned by a lay occupant until that 
 memorable summer afternoon when I en- 
 tered it as my home. A priest had 
 built it ; a priest had succeeded to it ; other 
 priestly men from time to time had dwelt 
 in it ; and children born in its chambers 
 had grown up to assume the priestly char- 
 acter. It is awful to reflect how many ser- 
 mons must have been written here! . . . 
 Here it was, too, that Emerson wrote 
 324 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 ' Nature ; 7 for he was then an inhabitant 
 of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyr- 
 ian dawn and Paphian sunset and moon- 
 rise from the summit of our eastern hill." 
 
 Emerson's residence in the Old Manse 
 is to be accounted for by the fact that his 
 grandfather was its first inhabitant. And 
 it was while living there with his mother 
 and kindred, before his second marriage 
 in 1835, that he produced " Nature." 
 
 It is to the parson, the Reverend Will- 
 iam Emerson, that we owe one of the most 
 valuable Revolutionary documents that 
 have come down to us. Soon after the 
 young minister came to the old Manse 
 (which was then the New Manse), he had 
 occasion to make in his almanac this stir- 
 ring entry : 
 
 " This morning, between one and two 
 o'clock, we were alarmed by the ringing 
 of th/3 bell, and upon examination found 
 
 325 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 that the troops, to the number of eight 
 hundred, had stole their march from Bos- 
 ton, in boats and barges, from the bottom 
 of the Common over to a point in Cam- 
 bridge, near to Inman's farm, and were 
 at Lexington meeting-house half an hour 
 before sunrise, where they fired upon a 
 body of our men, and (as we afterward 
 heard) had killed several. This intelli- 
 gence was brought us first by Doctor Sam- 
 uel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the 
 guard that were sent before on horses, 
 purposely to prevent all posts and messen- 
 gers from giving us timely information. 
 He, by the help of a very fleet horse, 
 crossing several walks and fences, arrived 
 at Concord, at the time above mentioned ; 
 when several posts were immediately 
 dispatched that, returning, confirmed the 
 account of the regulars' arrival at Lexing- 
 ton and that they were on their way to 
 326 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 Concord. Upon this, a number of our 
 minute-men belonging to this town, and 
 Acton, and Lincoln, with several others 
 that were in readiness, marched out to 
 meet them ; while the alarm company was 
 preparing to receive them in the town. 
 Captain Minot, who commanded them, 
 thought it proper to take possession of the 
 hill above the meeting-house, as the most 
 advantageous situation. No sooner had 
 our men gained it, than we were met by 
 the companies that were sent out to meet 
 the troops, who informed us that they were 
 just upon us, and that we must retreat, as 
 their number was more than treble ours. 
 We then retreated from the hill near the 
 Liberty Pole, and took a new post back of 
 the town upon an eminence, where we 
 formed into two battalions, and waited the 
 arrival of the enemy. 
 
 " Scarcely had we formed before we 
 
 327 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 saw the British troops at the distance of 
 a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, 
 advancing toward us with the greatest 
 celerity. Some were for making a stand, 
 notwithstanding the superiority of their 
 numbers, but others, more prudent, thought 
 best to retreat till our strength should be 
 equal to the enemy's by recruits from the 
 neighbouring towns, that were continually 
 coming in to our assistance. Accordingly 
 we retreated over the bridge; when the 
 troops came into the town, set fire to several 
 carriages for the artillery, destroyed sixty 
 barrels flour, rifled several houses, took pos- 
 session of the town-house, destroyed five 
 hundred pounds of balls, set a guard of 
 one hundred men at the North Bridge, and 
 sent a party to the house of Colonel Bar- 
 rett, where they were in the expectation of 
 finding a quantity of warlike stores. But 
 these were happily secured just before 
 328 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETREES 
 
 their arrival, by transportation into the 
 woods and other by-places. 
 
 " In the meantime the guard sent by the 
 enemy to secure the pass at the North 
 Bridge were alarmed by the approach of 
 our people ; who had retreated as before 
 mentioned, and were now advancing, with 
 special orders not to fire upon the troops 
 unless fired upon. These orders were so 
 punctually observed that we received the 
 fire of the enemy in three several and sep- 
 arate discharges of their pieces before it 
 was returned by our commanding officer; 
 the firing then became general for several 
 minutes; in which skirmish two were 
 killed on each side, and several of the 
 enemy wounded. (It may here be ob- 
 served, by the way, that we were the more 
 cautious to prevent beginning a rupture 
 with the king's troops, as we were then un- 
 certain what had happened at Lexington, 
 
 329 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 and knew not that they had begun the 
 quarrel there by first firing upon our peo- 
 ple, and killing eight men upon the spot.) 
 The three companies of troops soon quitted 
 their post at the bridge, and retreated in 
 the greatest disorder and confusion to the 
 main body, who were soon upon their 
 march to meet them. 
 
 " For half an hour the enemy, by their 
 marches and countermarches, discovered 
 great fickleness and inconstancy of mind, 
 sometimes advancing, sometimes return- 
 ing to their former posts; till at length 
 they quitted the town and retreated by 
 the way they came. In the meantime, a 
 party of our men (one hundred and fifty), 
 took the back way through the Great Fields 
 into the East Quarter, and had placed 
 themselves to advantage, lying in ambush 
 behind walls, fences, and buildings, ready 
 
 330 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 to fire upon the enemy on their re- 
 treat." 1 
 
 Here ends the important chronicle, the 
 best first-hand account we have of the battle 
 of Concord. But for this alone the first 
 resident of the Old Manse deserves our 
 memory and thanks. 
 
 Mr. Ernerson was succeeded at the 
 Manse by a certain Doctor Ripley, a ven- 
 erable scholar who left behind him a repu- 
 tation for learning and sanctity which 
 was reproduced in one of the ladies of 
 his family, long the most learned woman 
 in the little Concord circle which Haw- 
 thorne soon after his marriage came to 
 join. 
 
 Few New England villages have re- 
 tained so much of the charm and peaceful- 
 ness of country life as has Concord, and 
 
 i " Historic Towns of New England." G. P. Put- 
 nam's Sons. 
 
 331 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 few dwellings in Concord have to-day so 
 nearly the aspect they presented fifty 
 years ago as does the Manse, where Haw- 
 thorne passed three of the happiest years 
 of his life. 
 
 In the " American Note-Book," there is 
 a charming description of the pleasure the 
 romancer and his young wife experienced 
 in renovating and refurnishing the old 
 parsonage which, at the time of their going 
 into it, was " given up to ghosts and cob- 
 webs." Some of these ghosts have been 
 shiveringly described by Hawthorne him- 
 self in the marvellous paragraph of the in- 
 troduction already referred to : "Our [cler- 
 ical] ghost used to heave deep sighs in a 
 particular corner of the parlour, and some- 
 times rustle paper, as if he were turning 
 over a sermon in the long upper entry 
 where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in 
 spite of the bright moonshine that fell 
 332 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND BOOFTKEES 
 
 through the eastern window. Not im- 
 probably he wished me to edit and publish 
 a selection from a chest full of manuscript 
 discourses that stood in the garret. 
 
 " Once while Hillard and other friends 
 sat talking with us in the twilight, there 
 came a rustling noise as of a minister's 
 silk gown sweeping through the very midst 
 of the company, so closely as almost to 
 brush against the chairs. Still there was 
 nothing visible. 
 
 " A yet stranger business was that of a 
 ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard 
 in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grind- 
 ing coffee, cooking, ironing, perform- 
 ing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour^ 
 although no traces of anything accom- 
 plished could be detected the next morn- 
 ing. Some neglected duty of her servitude 
 some ill-starched ministerial band 
 
 333 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, 
 and kept her at work without wages." 
 
 The little drawing-room once remod- 
 elled, however, and the kitchen given over 
 to the Hawthorne pots and pans in 
 which the great Hawthorne himself used 
 often to have a stake, according to the tes- 
 timony of his wife, who once wrote in this 
 connection, " Imagine those magnificent 
 eyes fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking 
 in an iron kettle ! " the ghosts came no 
 more. Of the great people who in the 
 flesh passed pleasant hours in the little 
 parlour, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Emer- 
 son, and Margaret Fuller are names known 
 by everybody as intimately connected with 
 the Concord circle. 
 
 Hawthorne himself cared little for 
 
 society. Often he would go to the village 
 
 and back without speaking to a single soul, 
 
 he tells us, and once when his wife was 
 
 334 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 absent he resolved to pass the whole term 
 of her visit to relatives without saying a 
 word to any human being. With Thoreau, 
 however, he got on very well. This odd 
 genius was as shy and ungregarious as 
 was the dark-eyed " teller of tales/' but 
 the two appear to have been socially dis- 
 posed toward each other, and there are 
 delightful bits in the preface to the 
 " Mosses " in regard to the hours they 
 spent together boating on the large, quiet 
 Concord River. Thoreau was a great voy- 
 ager in a canoe which he had constructed 
 himself (and which he eventually made 
 over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the 
 use of his paddle as the redman who had 
 once haunted the same silent stream. 
 
 Of the beauties of the Concord River 
 Hawthorne has written a few sentences 
 that will live while the silver stream con- 
 tinues to flow : " It comes creeping softly 
 
 335 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 through the mid-most privacy and deepest 
 heart of a wood which whispers it to be 
 quiet, while the stream whispers back again 
 from its sedgy borders, as if river and 
 wood were hushing one another to sleep. 
 Yes; the river sleeps along its course 
 and dreams of the sky and the clustering 
 foliage. . . ." 
 
 Concerning the visitors attracted to 
 Concord by the great original thinker who 
 was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the ro- 
 mancer speaks with less delicate sympathy : 
 " Never was a poor little country village 
 infested with such a variety of queer, 
 strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, 
 most of whom look upon themselves to be 
 important agents of the world's destiny, 
 yet are simply bores of a very intense 
 character." A bit further on Hawthorne 
 speaks of these pilgrims as " hobgoblins 
 of flesh and blood/' people, he humourously 
 336 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 comments, who had lighted on a new 
 thought or a thought they fancied new, 
 and " came to Emerson as the finder of a 
 glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to 
 ascertain its quality and value." With 
 Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms 
 of easy intimacy. " Being happy," as he 
 says, and feeling, therefore, " as if there 
 were no question to be put," he was not 
 in any sense desirous of metaphysical in- 
 tercourse with the great philosopher. 
 
 It was while on the way home from his 
 friend Emerson's one day that Hawthorne 
 had that encounter with Margaret Fuller 
 about which it is so pleasant to read because 
 it serves to take away the taste of other less 
 complimentary allusions to this lady to be 
 found in Hawthorne's works: 
 
 "After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned 
 through the woods, and entering Sleepy 
 Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near 
 
 387 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOETBEES 
 
 the path which bends along its verge. It 
 was Margaret herself. She had been there 
 the whole afternoon, meditating or read- 
 ing, for she had a book in her hand with 
 some strange title which I did not under- 
 stand and have forgotten. She said that 
 nobody had broken her solitude, and was 
 just giving utterance to a theory that no 
 inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy 
 Hollow, when we saw a group of people 
 entering the sacred precincts. Most of 
 them followed a path which led them away 
 from us; but an old man passed near us, 
 and smiled to see Margaret reclining on 
 the ground and me standing by her side. 
 He made some remark upon the beauty of 
 the afternoon, and withdrew himself 
 into the shadow of the wood. Then we 
 talked about autumn, and about the pleas- 
 ures of being lost in the woods, and about 
 the crows whose voices Margaret had 
 338 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 heard ; and about the experiences of early 
 childhood, whose influence remains upon 
 the character after the recollection of them 
 has passed away; and about the sight of 
 mountains from a distance, and the view 
 from their summits ; and about other mat- 
 ters of high and low philosophy." 
 
 Nothing that Hawthorne has ever writ- 
 ten of Concord is more to be cherished 
 to-day than this description of a happy 
 afternoon passed by him in Sleepy Hollow 
 talking with Margaret Euller of " matters 
 of high and low philosophy." For there 
 are few parts of Concord to which visitors 
 go more religiously than to the still old 
 cemetery, where on the hill by Ridge Path 
 Hawthorne himself now sleeps quietly, 
 with the grave of Thoreau just behind him, 
 and the grave of Emerson, his philosopher- 
 friend, on the opposite side of the way. 
 A great pine stands at the head of Haw- 
 
 339 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 thorne's last resting-place, and a huge un- 
 hewn block of pink marble is his formal 
 monument. 
 
 Yet the Old Manse will, so long as it 
 stands, be the romancer's most intimate 
 relic, for it was here that he lived as a 
 happy bridegroom, and here that his first 
 child was born. And from this ancient 
 dwelling it was that he drew the inspira- 
 tion for what is perhaps the most curious 
 book of tales in all American literature, 
 a book of which another American master 
 of prose 1 has said, " Hawthorne here did 
 for our past what Walter Scott did for 
 the past of the mother-country; another 
 Wizard of the North, he breathed the 
 breath of life into the dry and dusty mate- 
 rials of history, and summoned the great 
 dead again to live and move among us." 
 1 Henry James. 
 
 340 
 
SALEM'S CHINESE GOD 
 
 the romantic figures which grace 
 the history of New England in the 
 nineteenth century, none is to be 
 compared in dash and in all those other 
 qualities that captivate the imagination 
 with the figure of Frederick Townsend 
 Ward, the Salem boy who won a general- 
 ship in the Chinese military service, sup- 
 pressed the Tai-Ping rebellion, organised 
 the " Ever- Victorious Army" -for whose 
 exploits " Chinese " Gordon always gets 
 credit in history and died fighting at 
 Ning Po for a nation of which he had be- 
 come one, a fair daughter of which he had 
 married, and by which he is to-day wor- 
 
 341 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 shipped as a god. Very far certainly did 
 this soldier of fortune wander in the thirty 
 short years of his life from the peaceful 
 red-brick Townsend mansion (now, alas ! a 
 steam bread bakery), at the corner of 
 Derby and Carleton Streets, Salem, in 
 which, in 1831, he was born. 
 
 This house was built by Ward's grand- 
 father, Townsend, and during Frederick's 
 boyhood was a charming place of the com- 
 fortable colonial sort, to which was joined 
 a big, rambling, old-fashioned garden, and 
 from the upper windows of which there 
 was to be had a fascinating view of the 
 broad-stretching sea. To the sea it was, 
 therefore, that the lad naturally turned 
 when, after ending his education at the 
 Salem High School, he was unable to gain 
 admission to the military academy at West 
 Point and follow the soldier career in 
 which it had always been his ambition to 
 342 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 shine. He shipped before the mast on an 
 American vessel sailing from New York. 
 Apparently even the hardships of such a 
 common sailor's lot could not dampen his 
 ardour for adventure, for he made a num- 
 ber of voyages. 
 
 At the outbreak of the Crimean war 
 young Ward was in France, and, thinking 
 that his long-looked for opportunity had 
 come, he entered the French army for ser- 
 vice against the Russians. Enlisting as a 
 private, he soon, through the influence of 
 friends, rose to be a lieutenant; but, be- 
 coming embroiled in a quarrel with his 
 superior officer, he resigned his commis- 
 sion and returned to New York, without 
 having seen service either in Russia or 
 Turkey. 
 
 The next few years of the young man's 
 life were passed as a ship broker in New 
 York City, but this work-a-day career soon 
 
 343 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTREES 
 
 became too humdrum, and he looked about 
 for something that promised more adven- 
 tures. He had not to look far. Colonel 
 William Walker and his filibusters were 
 about to start on the celebrated expedition 
 against Nicaragua, and with them Ward 
 determined to cast in his lot. Through the 
 trial by fire which awaited the ill-fated 
 expedition, he passed unhurt, and escaping 
 by some means or other its fatal termina- 
 tion, returned to New York. 
 
 California next attracted his attention, 
 but here he met with no better success, and 
 after a hand-to-mouth existence of a few 
 months he turned again to seafaring life, 
 and shipped for China as the mate of an 
 American vessel. His arrival at Shanghai 
 in 1859 was most opportune, for there the 
 chance for which he had been longing 
 awaited him. 
 
 The great Tai-Ping rebellion, that half- 
 344 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Christian, wholly fanatical uprising which 
 devastated many flourishing provinces, had, 
 at this time, attained alarming propor- 
 tions. Ching Wang, with a host of blood- 
 crazed rebels, had swept over the country 
 in the vicinity of Shanghai with fire and 
 sword, and at the time of Ward's arrival 
 these fanatics were within eighteen miles 
 of the city. 
 
 The Chinese merchants had appealed in 
 vain to the foreign consuls for assistance. 
 The imperial government had made no 
 plans for the preservation of Shanghai. So 
 the wealthy merchants, fearing for their 
 stores, resolved to take the matter into 
 their own hands, and after a consultation 
 of many days, offered a reward of two 
 hundred thousand dollars to any body of 
 foreigners who should drive the Tai-Pings 
 from the city of Sungkiang. 
 
 Salem's soldier of fortune, Frederick T. 
 
 345 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 Ward, responded at once to the opportunity 
 thus offered. He accepted in June, 1860, 
 the offer of Ta Kee, the mandarin at the 
 head of the merchant body, and in less than 
 a week such was the magnetism of the 
 man had raised a body of one hundred 
 foreign sailors, and, with an American by 
 the name of Henry Burgevine as his lieu- 
 tenant, had set out for Sungkiang. The 
 men in Ward's company were desperadoes, 
 for the most part, but they were no match, 
 of course, for the twelve thousand Tai- 
 Pings. This Ward realised as soon as the 
 skirmishing advance had been made, and 
 he returned to Shanghai for reinforce- 
 ments. 
 
 Erom the Chinese imperial troops he ob- 
 tained men to garrison whatever courts 
 the foreign legation might capture, an ar- 
 rangement which left the adventurers free 
 
 346 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 to go wherever their action could be most 
 effective. 
 
 Thus reinforced, Ward once more set 
 out for Sungkiang. Even on this occasion 
 his men were outnumbered one hundred 
 to one, but, such was the desperation of 
 the attacking force, the rebels were driven 
 like sheep to the slaughter, and the defeat 
 of the Tai-Pings was overwhelming. It 
 was during this battle, it is interesting to 
 know, that the term " foreign devils " first 
 found place in the Chinese vocabulary. 
 
 The promised reward was forthwith pre- 
 sented to the gifted American soldier, and 
 immediately Ward accepted a second com- 
 mission against the rebels at Singpo. The 
 Tai-Pings of this city were under the 
 leadership of a renegade Englishman 
 named Savage, and the fighting was fast 
 and furious. Ward and his men performed 
 many feats of valour, and actually scaled 
 
 347 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 the city wall, thirty feet in height, to fight 
 like demons upon its top. But it was with- 
 out avail. With heavy losses, they were 
 driven back. 
 
 But the attempt was not abandoned. Re- 
 tiring to Shanghai, Ward secured the 
 assistance of about one hundred new for- 
 eign recruits, and with them returned once 
 more to the scene of his defeat. Half a 
 mile from the walls of Singpo the little 
 band of foreign soldiers of fortune and 
 poorly organised imperial troops were met 
 by Savage and the Tai-Pings, and the bat- 
 tle that resulted waged for hours. The 
 rebels were the aggressors, and hn miles of 
 Ward's retreat upon Sungkiang saw fight- 
 ing every inch of the way. The line of 
 retreat was strewn with rebel dead, and 
 such were their losses that they retired 
 from the province altogether. 
 
 Later Savage was killed, and the Tai- 
 
 348 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 Pings quieted down. For his exploits 
 Ward received the monetary rewards 
 agreed upon, and was also granted the 
 button of a mandarin of the fourth degree. 
 
 He had received severe wounds during 
 the campaigns, and was taking time to 
 recuperate from them at Shanghai when 
 the jealousy of other foreigners made itself 
 felt, and the soldier from Salem was 
 obliged to face a charge before the United 
 States consul that he had violated the neu- 
 trality laws. The matter was dropped, 
 however, because the hero of Sungkiang 
 promply swore that he was no longer an 
 American citizen, as he had become a 
 naturalised subject of the Chinese em- 
 peror ! 
 
 Realising the value of the Chinese as 
 fighting men, Ward now determined to or- 
 ganise a number of Chinese regiments, 
 officer them with Europeans, and arm and 
 
 349 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 equip them after American methods. This 
 he did, and in six months he appeared at 
 Shanghai at the head of three bodies of 
 Chinese, splendidly drilled and under iron 
 discipline. He arrived in the nick of time, 
 and, routing a vastly superior force, saved 
 the city from capture. 
 
 After this exploit he was no longer 
 shunned by Europeans as an adventurer 
 and an outlaw. He was too prominent to 
 be overlooked. His Ever- Victorious Army, 
 as it was afterward termed, entered upon 
 a campaign of glorious victory. One after 
 another of the rebel strongholds fell before 
 it, and its leader was made a mandarin 
 of the highest grade, with the title of 
 admiral-general. 
 
 Ward then assumed the Chinese name of 
 
 Hwa, and married Changmei, a maiden of 
 
 high degree, who was nineteen at the time 
 
 of her wedding, and as the daughter of one 
 
 350 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 of the richest and most exalted mandarins 
 of the red button, was considered in China 
 an exceedingly good match for the Salem 
 youth. According to oriental standards 
 she was a beauty, too. 
 
 Ward did not rest long from his cam- 
 paigns, however, for we find that he was 
 soon besieged in the city of Sungkiang 
 with a few men. A relieving force of the 
 Ever- Victorious Army here came to his 
 assistance. 
 
 He did not win all his victories easily. 
 In the battle of Ningpo, toward the end of 
 the first division of the Tai-Ping rebellion, 
 the carnage was frightful. Outnumbered, 
 but not outgeneralled, the government 
 forces fought valiantly. Ward was shot 
 through the stomach while leading a 
 charge, but refused to leave the field while 
 the battle was on. Through his field offi- 
 cers he directed his men, and when the 
 
 351 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 victory was assiired, fell back unconscious 
 in the arms of his companion, Burgevine 
 He was carried to Ningpo, where he died 
 the following morning, a gallant and dis- 
 tinguished soldier, although still only 
 thirty years old. 
 
 In the Confucian cemetery at Ningpo 
 his body was laid at rest with all possible 
 honours and with military ceremony be- 
 coming his rank. Over his grave, and that 
 of his young wife, who survived him only 
 a few months, a mausoleum was erected, 
 and monuments were placed on the scenes 
 of his victories. The mausoleum soon be- 
 came a shrine invested with miraculous 
 power, and a number of years after his 
 death General Ward was solemnly declared 
 to be a joss or god. The manuscript of the 
 imperial edict to this effect is now pre- 
 served in the Essex Institute. 
 
 The command of the Ever- Victorious 
 352 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 army reverted to Burgevine, but later, 
 through British intrigue, to General Gor- 
 don. It was Ward, however, the Salem 
 lad, who organised the army by which 
 Chinese Gordon gained his fame. The 
 British made a saint and martyr of Gor- 
 don, and called Ward an adventurer and 
 a common sailor, but the Chinese rated 
 him more nearly as he deserved. 
 
 In a little red-bound volume printed in 
 Shanghai in 1863, and translated from the 
 Chinese for the benefit of a few of General 
 Ward's relatives in this country a work 
 which I have been permitted to examine 
 the native chronicler says of our hero : 
 
 " What General Ward has done to and 
 for China is as yet but imperfectly known, 
 for those whose duty it is to transfer to pos- 
 terity a record of this great man are either 
 so wrapped in speculation as to how to 
 build themselves up on his deeds of the 
 
 353 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 past time, or are so fearful that any com 
 merit on any subject regarding him may 
 detract from their ability, that with his 
 last breath they allow all that appertains 
 to him to be buried in the tomb. Not one 
 in ten thousand of them could at all 
 approach him in military genius, in 
 courage, and in resource, or do anything 
 like what he did." 
 
 In his native land Ward has never been 
 honoured as he deserves to be. On the 
 contrary, severe criticism has been accorded 
 him because he was fighting in China for 
 money during our civil war, " when," said 
 his detractors, " he might have been using 
 his talents for the protection of the flag 
 under which he was born." 
 
 But this was the fault of circumstances 
 
 rather than of intention. Ward wished, 
 
 above everything, to be a soldier, and when 
 
 he found fighting waiting for him in 
 
 354 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 China, it was the most natural thing in the 
 world for him to accept the opportunity 
 the gods provided. But he did what he 
 could under the circumstances for his 
 country. He offered ten thousand dollars 
 to the national cause and was killed in 
 the Chinese war before the answer to his 
 proffer of financial aid came from Minister 
 Anson Burlingame. 
 
 It is rather odd that just the amount 
 that he wished to be used by the North 
 for the advancement of the Union cause 
 has recently (1901) been bequeathed to 
 the Essex Institute at Salem by Miss 
 Elizabeth C. Ward, his lately deceased sis- 
 ter, to found a Chinese library in memory 
 of Salem's soldier of fortune. Thus is 
 rounded out this very romantic chapter of 
 modern American history. 
 
 355 
 
THE WELL -SWEEP OE A SONG 
 
 rHAT the wise Shakespeare spoke 
 the truth when he observed that 
 " one touch of nature makes the 
 whole world kin " has never been better 
 exemplified than in the affectionate tender- 
 ness with which all sorts and conditions 
 of men join in singing a song like " The 
 Old Oaken Bucket. 77 As one hears this 
 ballad in a crowded room, or even as so 
 often given in a New England play like 
 " The Old Homestead, 77 one does not stop 
 to analyse one's sensations; one forgets 
 the homely phrase ; one simply feels and 
 knows oneself the better for the memories 
 356 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 of happy and innocent childhood which the 
 simple song invokes. 
 
 Dear, delightful Goldsmith has wonder- 
 fully expressed in "The Deserted Village'' 
 the inextinguishable yearning for the spot 
 we call " home " : 
 
 " In all my wanderings round this world of care, 
 In all my griefs and God has given my share 
 I still had hopes, my long vexations past, 
 Here to return and die at home at last," 
 
 and it is this same lyric cry that has been 
 crystallised for all time, so far as the 
 American people are concerned, in " The 
 Old Oaken Bucket." 
 
 The day will not improbably come when 
 the allusions in this poem will demand as 
 careful an explanation as some of Shake- 
 speare's archaic references now call for. 
 But even when this time does come, and 
 an elaborate description of the strange old 
 custom of drawing water from a hole in 
 
 357 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 the ground by means of a long pole and 
 a rude pail will be necessary to an under- 
 standing of the poem, men's voices will 
 grow husky and their eyes will dim at the 
 music of " The Old Oaken Bucket." 
 
 It is to the town of Scituate, Massachu- 
 setts, one of the most ancient settlements 
 of the old colony, that we trace back the 
 local colour which pervades the poem. The 
 history of the place is memorable and in- 
 teresting. The people come of a hardy 
 and determined ancestry, who fought for 
 every inch of ground that their descendants 
 now hold. To this fact may perhaps be 
 attributed the strength of those associa- 
 tions, clinging like ivy around some of the 
 most notable of the ancient homesteads. 
 
 The scene so vividly described in the 
 
 charming ballad we are considering is a 
 
 little valley through which Herring Brook 
 
 pursues its devious way to meet the tidal 
 
 358 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 waters of North River. " The view of it 
 from Coleman Heights, with its neat cot- 
 tages, its maple groves, and apple orchards, 
 is remarkably beautiful," writes one appre- 
 ciative author. The " wide-spreading 
 pond," the " mill," the " dairy-house," the 
 " rock where the cataract fell," and even 
 the " old well," if not the original " moss- 
 covered bucket " itself, may still be seen 
 just as the poet described them. 
 
 In quaint, homely Scituate, Samuel 
 Woodworth, the people's poet, was indeed 
 born and reared. Although the original 
 house is no longer there, a pretty place 
 called " The Old Oaken Bucket House " 
 still stands, a modern successor to the poet's 
 home, and at another bucket, oaken if not 
 old, the pilgrim of to-day may stop to 
 slake his thirst from the very waters, the 
 recollection of which gave the poet such 
 exquisite pleasure in after years. One 
 
 359 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 would fain have the surroundings un- 
 changed the cot where Woodworth 
 dwelt, the ponderous well-sweep, creaking 
 with age, at which his youthful hands were 
 wont to tug strongly ; and finally the mossy 
 bucket, overflowing with crystal nectar 
 fresh from the cool depths below. Yet in 
 spite of the changes, one gets fairly well 
 the illusion of the ancient spot, and comes 
 away well content to have quaffed a 
 draught of such excellent water to the 
 memory of this Scituate poet. 
 
 The circumstances under which the pop- 
 pular ballad was composed and written 
 are said to be as follows: Samuel Wood- 
 worth was a printer who had served his 
 apprenticeship under the veteran Major 
 Russell of the Columbian Centinel, a jour- 
 nal which was in its day the leading Fed- 
 eralist organ of New England. He had 
 inherited the wandering propensity of his 
 360 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTKEES 
 
 craft, and yielding to the desire for change 
 he was successively in Hartford and New 
 York, doing what he could in a journalistic 
 way. In the latter city he became asso- 
 ciated, after an unsuccessful career as a 
 publisher, in the editorship of the Mirror. 
 And it was while living in New York in 
 the Bohemian fashion of his class, that, in 
 company with some brother printers, he 
 one day dropped in at a well-known estab- 
 lishment then kept by one Mallory to take 
 a social glass of wine. 
 
 The cognac was pronounced excellent. 
 After drinking it, Woodworth set his glass 
 down on the table, and, smacking his lips, 
 declared emphatically that Mallory's eau 
 de vie was superior to anything that he had 
 ever tasted. 
 
 " There you are mistaken," said one of 
 his comrades, quietly ; then added, " there 
 certainly was one thing that far surpassed 
 
 361 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 this in the way of drinking, as you, too, 
 will readily acknowledge.' 7 
 
 " Indeed ; and, pray, what was that ? " 
 Woodworth asked, with apparent incred- 
 ulity that anything could surpass the liquor 
 then before him. 
 
 " The draught of pure and sparkling 
 spring water that we used to get from the 
 old oaken bucket that hung in the well, 
 after our return from the labours of the 
 field on a sultry summer's day." 
 
 No one spoke ; all were busy with their 
 own thoughts. 
 
 Woodworth's eyes became dimmed. 
 " True, true," he exclaimed ; and soon 
 after quitted the place. With his heart 
 overflowing with the recollections that this 
 chance allusion in a barroom had inspired, 
 the scene of his happier childhood life 
 rushed upon him in a flood of feeling. He 
 hastened back to the office in which he then 
 362 
 
OLD JSTEW ENGLAND KOOETKEES 
 
 worked, seized a pen, and in half an hour 
 had written his popular ballad : 
 
 " How dear to this heart are the scenes of my 
 
 childhood, 
 
 When fond recollection presents them to view ! 
 The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild- 
 wood, 
 And every loved spot which my infancy 
 
 knew, 
 The wide-spreading pond and the mill which 
 
 stood by it, 
 The bridge and the rock where the cataract 
 
 fell; 
 
 The cot of my father, the dairy-house nigh it, 
 And e'en the rude bucket that hung in the 
 
 well, - 
 
 The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 
 The moss-covered bucket which hung in the 
 well. 
 
 " The moss-covered vessel I hail as a treasure ; 
 For often at noon when returned from the 
 
 field, 
 I found it the source of an exquisite pleasure, 
 
 The purest and sweetest that nature can yield. 
 How ardent I seized it with hands that were 
 
 glowing ! 
 
 And quick to the white-pebbled bottom it fell ; 
 
 363 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 Then soon with the emblem of truth overflow- 
 ing, 
 And dripping with coolness it rose from the 
 
 well, 
 
 The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 
 The moss-covered bucket, arose from the well. 
 
 "How sweet from the green mossy brim to 
 
 receive it, 
 As, poised from the curb, it inclined to my 
 
 lips! 
 Not a full blushing goblet could tempt me to 
 
 leave it, 
 Though filled with the nectar that Jupiter 
 
 sips. 
 And now, far removed from the loved situation, 
 
 The tear of regret will intrusively swell, 
 As fancy reverts to my father's plantation, 
 
 And sighs for the bucket which hangs in the 
 
 well, 
 
 The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 
 The moss-covered bucket which hangs in the 
 well." 
 
 Woodworth's reputation rests upon this 
 one stroke of genius. He died in 1842 a{, 
 the age of fifty-seven. But after almosi 
 364 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTEEES 
 
 fifty years his memory is still green, and 
 we still delight to pay tender homage to 
 the spot which inspired one of the most 
 beautiful songs America has yet produced. 
 
 365 
 
WHITTIER'S LOST LOVE 
 
 /N" the life of the Quaker poet there is 
 an unwritten chapter of personal his- 
 tory full to the brim of romance. It 
 will be remembered that Whittier in his 
 will left ten thousand dollars for an Ames- 
 bury Home for Aged Women. One room 
 in this home Mrs. Elizabeth W. Pickard 
 (the niece to whom the poet bequeathed his 
 Amesbury homestead, and who passed 
 away in the early spring of this year 
 [1902], in an illness contracted while 
 decorating her beloved uncle's grave on the 
 anniversary of his birth), caused to be 
 furnished with a massive black walnut 
 366 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND BOOFTKEES 
 
 set formerly used in the " spare-room " of 
 her uncle's house the room where Lucy 
 Larcom, Gail Hamilton, the Gary sisters, 
 and George Macdonald were in former 
 times entertained. A stipulation of this 
 gift was that the particular room in the 
 Home thus to be furnished was to be 
 known as the Whittier room. 
 
 In connection with this Home and this 
 room comes the story of romantic interest. 
 Two years after the death of Mr. Whittier 
 an old lady made application for admission 
 to the Home on the ground that in her 
 youth she was a schoolmate and friend of 
 the poet. And although she was not en- 
 titled to admission by being a resident of 
 the town, she would no doubt have been 
 received if she had not died soon after 
 making the application. 
 
 This aged woman was Mrs. Evelina 
 Bray Downey, concerning whose schoolgirl 
 
 367 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 friendship for Whittier many inaccurate 
 newspaper articles were current at the 
 time of her death, in the spring of 1895. 
 The story as here told is, however, 
 authentic. 
 
 Evelina Bray was born at Marblehead, 
 October 10, 1810. She was the youngest 
 of ten children of a ship master, who made 
 many voyages to the East Indies and to 
 European ports. In a letter written in 
 1884, Mrs Downey said of herself: " My 
 father, an East India sea captain, made 
 frequent and long voyages. For safe- 
 keeping and improvement he sent me to 
 Haverhill, bearing a letter of introduction 
 from Captain William Story to the family 
 of Judge Bartley. They passed me over to 
 Mr. Jonathan K. Smith, and Mrs. Smith 
 gave me as a roommate her only daughter, 
 Mary. This was the opening season of 
 the New Haverhill Academy, a sort of 
 368 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 rival to the Bradford Academy. Subse- 
 quently I graduated from the Ipswich 
 Female Seminary, in the old Mary Lyon 
 days." 
 
 Mary Smith, Miss Bray's roommate at 
 Haverhill, and her lifelong friend 
 though for fifty years they were lost to 
 each other was afterward the wife of 
 Reverend Doctor S. F. Smith, the author 
 of " America." 
 
 Evelina is described as a tall and stri- 
 kingly beautiful brunette, with remarkable 
 richness of colouring, and she took high 
 rank in scholarship. The house on Water 
 Street at which she boarded was directly 
 opposite that of Abijah W. Thayer, editor 
 of the Haverhill Gazette, with whom 
 Whittier boarded while at the academy. 
 Whittier was then nineteen years old, and 
 Evelina was seventeen. Naturally, they 
 walked to and from the school together, 
 
 369 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTREES 
 
 and their interest in each other was notice- 
 able. 
 
 If the Quaker lad harboured thoughts of 
 marriage, and even gave expression to 
 them, it would not be strange. But the 
 traditions of Whittier's sect included dis- 
 approval of music, and Evelina's father 
 had given her a piano, and she was fasci- 
 nated with the study of the art proscribed 
 by the Quakers. Then, too, Whittier was 
 poor, and his gift of versification, which 
 had already given him quite a reputation, 
 was not considered in those days of much 
 consequence as a means of livelihood. If 
 they did not at first realise, both of them, 
 the hopelessness of their love, they found 
 it out after Miss Bray's return to her home. 
 
 About this time Mr. Whittier accom- 
 panied his mother to a quarterly meeting 
 of the Society of Friends at Salem, and 
 one morning before breakfast took a walk 
 370 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTBEES 
 
 of a few miles to the quaint old town of 
 Marblehead, where he paid a visit to the 
 home of his schoolmate. She could not 
 invite him in, but instead suggested a 
 stroll along the picturesque, rocky shore 
 of the bay. 
 
 This was in the spring or early summer 
 of 1828, and the poet was twenty years 
 old, a farmer's boy, with high ambitions, 
 but with no outlook as yet toward any 
 profession. It may be imagined that the 
 young couple, after a discussion of the 
 situation, saw the hopelessness of securing 
 the needed consent of their parents, and 
 returned from their morning's walk with 
 saddened hearts. Whatever dreams they 
 may have cherished were from that hour 
 abandoned, and they parted with this un- 
 derstanding. 
 
 In the next fifty years they mefc but once 
 again, four or five years after the morning 
 
 371 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KOOFTKEES 
 
 walk, and this once was at Marblehead, 
 along the shore. Miss Bray had in the 
 meantime been teaching in a seminary 
 in Mississippi, and Whittier had been edit- 
 ing papers in Boston and Hartford, and 
 had published his first book, a copy of 
 which he had sent her. There was no re- 
 newal at this time of their lover-like rela- 
 tions, and they parted in friendship. 
 
 I have said that they met but once in the 
 half-century after that morning's walk; 
 the truth is they were once again close to- 
 gether, but Whittier was not conscious of 
 it. This was while he was editing the 
 Pennsylvania Freeman, at Philadelphia. 
 Miss Bray was then associated with a Miss 
 Catherine Beecher, in an educational 
 movement of considerable importance, and 
 was visiting Philadelphia.. Just at this time 
 a noted Massachusetts divine, Reverend 
 Doctor Todd, was announced to preach in 
 372 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAKD ROOFTEEES 
 
 the Presbyterian church, and both these 
 Haverhill schoolmates were moved to hear 
 him. By a singular chance they occupied 
 the same pew, and sat close together, but 
 Miss Bray was the only one who was con- 
 scious of this, and she was too shy to reveal 
 herself. It must have been her bonnet hid 
 her face, for otherwise Whittier's remark- 
 ably keen eyes could not have failed to 
 recognise the dear friend of his school- 
 days. 
 
 Their next meeting was at the reunion 
 of the Haverhill Academy class of 1827, 
 which was held in 1885, half a century 
 after their second interview at Marble- 
 head. It was said by some that it was this 
 schoolboy love which Whittier commemo- 
 rated in his poem, " Memories." But Mr. 
 Pickard, the poet's biographer, affirms that, 
 so far as known, the only direct reference 
 made by Whittier to the affair under 
 
 373 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTKEES 
 
 consideration occurred in the fine poem, 
 " A Sea Dream/' written in 1874. 
 
 In the poet, now an old man, the sight 
 of Marblehead awakens the memory of that 
 morning walk, and he writes : 
 
 " Is this the wind, the soft sea wind 
 That stirred thy locks of brown ? 
 Are these the rocks whose mosses knew 
 The trail of thy light gown, 
 Where boy and girl sat down ? 
 
 " I see the gray fort's broken wall, 
 
 The boats that rock below ; 
 And, out at sea, the passing sails 
 We saw so long ago, 
 Rose-red in morning's glow. 
 
 " Thou art not here, thou art not there, 
 
 Thy place I cannot see ; 
 I only know that where thou art 
 The blessed angels be, 
 And heaven is glad for thee. 
 
 But turn to me thy dear girl -face 
 Without the angel's crown, 
 374 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOETKEES 
 
 The wedded roses of thy lips, 
 Thy loose hair rippling down 
 In waves of golden brown. 
 
 " Look forth once more through space and time 
 
 And let thy sweet shade fall 
 In tenderest grace of soul and form 
 On memory's frescoed wall, 
 A shadow, and yet all 1 " 
 
 Whittier, it will be seen, believed that 
 the love of his youth was dead. He was 
 soon to find out, in a very odd way, that 
 this was not the case. 
 
 Early in the forties, Miss Bray became 
 principal of the " female department " of 
 the Benton School at St. Louis. In 1849, 
 during the prevalence of a fearful epi- 
 demic, the school building was converted 
 into a hospital, and one of the patients was 
 an Episcopal clergyman, Reverend Will- 
 iam S. Downey, an Englishman, claiming 
 to be of noble birth. He recovered his 
 health, but was entirely deaf, not being 
 
 375 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 able to hear the loudest sound for the re- 
 mainder of his life. Miss Bray married 
 him, and for forty years endured martyr- 
 dom, for he was of a tyrannous disposition 
 and disagreeably eccentric. 
 
 Mrs. Downey had never told her hus- 
 band of her early acquaintance with Whit- 
 tier, but he found it out by a singular 
 chance. When Reverend S. F. Smith and 
 his wife celebrated the fiftieth anniversary 
 of their marriage the event was mentioned 
 in the papers, and the fact that Mrs. Smith 
 was a schoolmate of Whittier was chron- 
 icled. Mr. Downey had heard his wife 
 speak of being a schoolmate of the wife of 
 the author of " America," and, putting 
 these two circumstances together, he con- 
 cluded that his wife must also have known 
 the Quaker poet in his youth. He said 
 nothing to her about this, however, but 
 wrote a letter to Whittier himself, and sent 
 376 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOETREES 
 
 with it a tract he had written in severe 
 denunciation of Colonel Robert G. Inger- 
 soll. As a postscript to this letter he 
 asked : " Did you ever know Evelina 
 Bray ? " Whittier at once replied, ac- 
 knowledging the receipt of the tract, and 
 making this characteristic comment upon 
 it: 
 
 " It occurs to me to say, however, that 
 in thy tract thee has hardly charity enough 
 for that unfortunate man, Ingersoll, who, 
 it se^ms to me, is much to be pitied for 
 his darkness of unbelief. We must re- 
 member that one of the great causes of 
 infidelity is the worldliness, selfishness, 
 and evil dealing of professed Christians. 
 An awful weight of responsibility rests 
 upon the Christian church in this respect." 
 
 And to this letter Whittier added as a 
 postscript : " Can you give me the address 
 of Evelina Bray ? " Mr. Downey at once 
 
 377 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTREES 
 
 wrote that he was her husband, told of his 
 service of the Master, and indirectly 
 begged for assistance in his work of spread- 
 ing the gospel. At this time he was an 
 evangelist of the Baptist church, having 
 some time since abandoned the mother 
 faith. And, though he was not reduced 
 to poverty, he accepted alms, as if poor, 
 thus trying sorely the proud spirit of his 
 wife. So it was not an unwonted request. 
 Of course, the poet had no sympathy 
 with the work of attack Mr. Downey was 
 evidently engaged in. But he feared the 
 girl friend of his youth might be in des- 
 titute circumstances, and, for her sake, he 
 made a liberal remittance. All this the 
 miserable husband tried to keep from his 
 wife, who he knew would at once return 
 the money, but she came upon the fact of 
 the remittance by finding Whittier's letter 
 in her husband's pocket. 
 378 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND ROOFTBEES 
 
 Naturally, she was very indignant, but 
 her letter to Whittier returning the money 
 was couched in the most delicate terms, 
 and gave no hint of the misery of her life. 
 Until the year of his death she was an 
 occasional correspondent with the poet, one 
 of his last letters, written at Hampton 
 Falls in the summer of 1892, being ad- 
 dressed to her. Their only meeting was at 
 the Haverhill Academy reunion of 1885, 
 fifty-eight years after the love episode of 
 their school-days. 
 
 When they met at Haverhill the poet 
 took the love of his youth apart from the 
 other schoolmates, and they then exchanged 
 souvenirs, he receiving her miniature 
 painted on ivory, by Porter, the same artist 
 who painted the first likeness ever taken of 
 Whittier. This latter miniature is now 
 in the possession of Mr. Pickard. The 
 portrait of Miss Bray, representing her 
 
 3T9 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND KQOFTBEES 
 
 in the full flush of her girlish beauty, 
 wearing as a crown a wreath of roses, was 
 returned to Mrs. Downey after the poet's 
 death, by the niece of Whittier, into whose 
 possession it came. 
 
 Mrs. Downey spent her last days in the 
 family of Judge Bradley, at West New- 
 bury, Massachusetts. After her death 
 some valuable china of hers was sold at 
 auction, and several pieces were secured by 
 a neighbour, Mrs. Ladd. The Ladd family 
 has since taken charge of the Whittier 
 birthplace at East Haverhill, and by this 
 chain of circumstances Evelina Bray's 
 china now rests on the Whittier shelves, 
 together with the genuine Whittier china, 
 put in its old place by Mrs. Pickard. 
 
 It was not because of destitution that 
 Mrs. Downey made application to enter 
 the Old Ladies' Home which Whittier en- 
 dowed, but, because, cherishing until the 
 380 
 
OLD NEW ENGLAND EOOFTEEES 
 
 day of her death her youthful fondness for 
 the poet, she longed to live during the sun- 
 set time of her life near his grave. In all 
 probability her request would have been 
 granted, had not she, too, been suddenly 
 called to the land where there is neither 
 marriage nor giving in marriage. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 381 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, John, 96. 
 
 Adams, Mrs. John, 111. 
 
 Adams, Samuel, 119. 
 
 Agassiz, Mrs., 290. 
 
 Alford, Mrs. A. G., 297. 
 
 Allston, 270. 
 
 Antigua merchant, 60 
 
 Auburn, Mount, 328. 
 
 Bana, Doctor, discovers Deborah Sampson's secret, 
 181 ; sends letter to General Patterson, 188. 
 
 Bancroft, 309. 
 
 Barlow, Mrs., 301. 
 
 Barr, George L., buys Royall House, 72. 
 
 Bartley, Judge, 368. 
 
 Bath, 13 ; death of Frankland at, 55. 
 
 Beck, Doctor, 286. 
 
 Belem, Frankland sails from, 53. 
 
 Belknap, Jeremy, letter of, 265. 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, 11 ; student at Dublin University, 
 12 ; fellow at Trinity College, 12 ; life as a tutor, 
 12 ; reception in London, 28 ; marriage, 29 ; sails 
 for Rhode Island, 30 ; arrives at Newport, 30 ; 
 writes " Minute Philosopher," 32 ; bequeaths books 
 to Yale College, 33 ; dies at Oxford, 34 ; portrait 
 by Smibert, 35. 
 
 Bermuda, proposed college at, 13. 
 
 " Blithedale Romance," 300, 307. 
 
 Bradley, Judge, 380. 
 
 Bray. Evelina, born at Marblehead, 368. 
 
 Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education 
 organised, 296. 
 
 " Brothers and Sisters " at Fay House, 292. 
 
 Brown, Rev. Arthur, 248. 
 
 Brownson. 301. 
 
 Brunswick, triumphs of Riedesels at, 145. 
 
 383 
 
INDEX 
 
 Burgevine, Henry, 346. 
 
 Burlingame, Anson, 355. 
 
 Burgoyne, 56, 136. 
 
 Burr, Aaron, 123. 
 
 Burr, Thaddeus, 120. 
 
 Bynner's story, Agnes Surriage, 45. 
 
 Cadenus and Vanessa, poem, 24. 
 
 Caldwell, Sir John, 305. 
 
 Carlyle visited by Ripley, 299. 
 
 Caroline, Queen (consort George Second), 29. 
 
 Carter, Madam, 135. 
 
 Cary Sisters, 367. 
 
 Channing, Ellery, 334. 
 
 Channing, Lucy, 282. 
 
 Channing, Mary, 281. 
 
 Channing, William Henry, 282, 314. 
 
 Chambly, Baroness Riedesel at, 131. 
 
 Charlestown City Hall, 270. 
 
 Chichester, Eng., 56. 
 
 Child, Professor, 286. 
 
 Christ Church, Boston, 104. 
 
 Church, Doctor, 122 ; fall of, 147 ; imprisoned, 150 ; 
 education of, 151 ; delivers Old South Oration, 
 152 ; tried at Watertown, 154 ; confined in Nor- 
 wich Jail, 155; lost at sea (?), 156. 
 
 Clark, Rev. Jonas. 111. 
 
 Clark, Mrs. Jonas. 118. 
 
 Clarke mansion purchased by Frankland, 54. 
 
 Clough, Capt. Stephen, 162. 
 
 Codman, Mrs. J. Amory, 261. 
 
 Codman, Martha, 261. 
 
 Columbian ('ciitincl, 360. 
 
 Coolidge, J. Templeton, 247. 
 
 Corey, Giles, pressed to death, 238. 
 
 Corey, Mrs. Martha, condemned as witch, 234. 
 
 Corwin, Justice Jonathan, 226, 228. 
 
 Cotton, Rev. John, 212, 221. 
 
 Courier, Nnr Eiifiland, 30. 
 
 Congress. Continental, 120. 
 
 Copley, 270. 
 
 Crowninshield, Hannah, 85. 
 
 Curtis, George William, at Brook Farm, 303. 
 
 Dana, Charles, 303. 
 
 Dana, Dr. J. Freeman, 274. 
 
 Dana, Edmund, 2S1. 
 
 Dana, Sophia Willard, 281 : marries George Ripley, 
 293 : goes over to Rome, 299. 
 
 Danvers, 228. 
 
 Dawes at Lexington, 114. 
 
 Deerfield. 190. 
 
 Diaz. Abby Morton. 304. 
 
 Dorothy Q. at Lexington, 112, 117; marries John 
 
 384 
 
INDEX 
 
 Hancock, 123 : marries Captain Scott, 128 ; re- 
 ceives Lafayette, 129. 
 
 Downey, Evelina Bray, 367. 
 
 Downey, Rev. William S., 375, 376. 
 
 Drew, Mr. John, 56. 
 
 Duse, Eleanora, at Fay House, 290. 
 
 Dunbarton, Stark House at, 74. 
 
 Dwight, John, 303. 
 
 Dwight, Marianne, 303. 
 
 Dwight, President of Yale College, 269. 
 
 Edmonston, Captain, 140. 
 
 Elizabeth, loss of the Ossolis on, 322. 
 
 Eliot, John, at Deerfleld, 190. 
 
 Ellsworth, Annie G., 275. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, at The Manse, 325 ; Haw- 
 thorne and, 337. 
 
 Emerson, William, at The Manse, 325. 
 
 Endicott, Governor, 227. 
 
 Erving, George, at Medford, 63. 
 
 Essex Institute, 67 ; Ward bequest to, 355. 
 
 Eustis, Madam, 46. 
 
 Everett, Edward, 281. 
 
 Fairbanks, Jason, 252 ; trial of, 258 ; escape of, 259 ; 
 hanging of, 259. 
 
 Fairbanks, Jonathan, 260. 
 
 Fairbanks, Rebecca, 260. 
 
 Fairbanks, Chapter D. R., 260. 
 
 " Fair Harvard " written in Fay House, 289. 
 
 Fales, Elizabeth, 252 ; murder of, 257. 
 
 Fay House, 279. 
 
 Fay, Maria Denny, 283. 
 
 Fay, P. P., 283. 
 
 Felton, President, 286. 
 
 Fielding, Henry, describes Lisbon, 50. 
 
 Fire Island Beach, loss of the Ossolis off, 323. 
 
 Fountain Inn, Marblehead, 58. 
 
 Frankland, Charles Henry, 39 ; born in Bengal, 39 ; 
 collector of Boston port, 39 : meets Agnes Surriage, 
 43 ; adopts Agnes Surriage, 44 ; builds home at 
 Hopkinton, 48 ; dies at Lisbon, 55. 
 
 Franks, Miss, 100. 
 
 Fuller, Margaret, at Brook Farm, 301 : born in Cam- 
 bridge, 312; joins Tribune staff, 316; at Concord, 
 338 ; goes abroad, 317 ; marries Ossoli, 320 ; is 
 lost at sea, 322. 
 
 Fuller, Timothy, 312. 
 
 Gage, General, at Boston, 107 ; in correspondence 
 with Church, 149. 
 
 Geer, Mr., present owner Royall House, 73. 
 
 George First, 29. 
 
 George Third entertains the Riedesels, 142 ; West's 
 anecdote of, 271. 
 
 385 
 
INDEX 
 
 Gilman, Arthur, 287. 
 
 Oilman, Dr. Samuel, 289. 
 
 Goldsmith, 357. 
 
 Gordon, " Chinese " 341. 
 
 Greeley, Horace, 316. 
 
 Greenough, Lily, 288. 
 
 Greenough, Mrs., 288. 
 
 Griswold, Sarah E., 276. 
 
 Hamilton, Gail, 367. 
 
 Hancock, John, at Lexington, 111 ; letters of, 120, 
 122 ; marries Miss Quincy, 123 ; occupies home on 
 Beacon Street, 125 ; dies, 128. 
 
 Hancock, Lydia, at Lexington, 118. 
 
 Hartford, Conn., Riedesels entertain Lafayette at, 
 140. 
 
 Haverhill Academy, 368. 
 
 Haverhill Gazette, 369. 
 
 Hawthorne writes of Sir Wm. Pepperell, 67 ; goes 
 to Brook Farm, 295 ; writes of Margaret Fuller, 
 310 ; at The Manse, 324. 
 
 Higginson, Col. Thomas Wentworth, 281 ; writes of 
 Margaret Fuller, 314. 
 
 Hilliard at The Manse, 333. 
 
 Hilton, Martha, 242 ; marries Governor Wentworth, 
 248. 
 
 Hobgoblin Hall, 72. 
 
 Hollingsworth, 301. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 280. 
 
 Honeyman's Hill (Newport, R. I.), 16. 
 
 Hopkinton (Mass.), 48; home of Frankland burned, 
 57 ; residence of Frankland, 55 ; Agnes Surriage 
 at, 55. 
 
 Howard, Lady, 142. 
 
 Howe, Sir William. 99, 13U. 13s. 
 
 Hutchinson, Ann, Mrs.. 210 : arrives in Boston, 214 ; 
 holds meetings, 21(5: accused of heresy, 219; sen- 
 tenced, 220 ; banished. 222 : murdered, 224. 
 
 Hutchinson, Governor. 221', 230. 
 
 Inman's Farm. 32(>. 
 
 Ireland, Nathaniel. 279. 
 
 Isle of Shoals. r,l>. 
 
 James. Professor William, 232. 
 
 Johnson, Doctor, 20, 24. 
 
 Kittery Point. (\(\. 
 
 Ladd, Mrs., 380. 
 
 Lafayette entertained by Starks, 80 ; on Washington 
 and Lee, 90 : entertained by John Hancock. 128 ; 
 received by Madame Scott. 129; dines with Bar- 
 oness Riedesel, 140: visits George Third, 142. 
 
 Lane, Professor, 286. 
 
 Larcom, Lucy. 3(57. 
 
 Lamed. " Sam," 304. 
 
 386 
 
INDEX 
 
 Lauterbach, family vault of liiedesels at, 1 4.>. 
 
 Lee, General, at Royall House, 71. 
 
 Lee, General, in British army, 90 ; arrives in New 
 York, 92 ; at Medford, 94 ; at Soinerville, 95 ; dies 
 in Virginia, 103. 
 
 Lee, Sydney, 103. 
 
 Lexington, affair at, 110. 
 
 Lindencrone, De Hegermann, 288. 
 
 Lisbon, Frankland at, 50 ; earthquake at, 51 ; Agnes 
 Surriage's experience at, 56 ; Frankland consul- 
 general at, 55. 
 
 Longfellow, 286. 
 
 Louisburg, 67. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 281. 
 
 Lowell, John, 257. 
 
 Luther, Martin, Orphan Home, 297. 
 
 Macdon'ald, George, 367. 
 
 Marblehead, Maid of, 37 ; Town House, 39 ; Fountain 
 Inn, 42 ; Whittier at, 371. 
 
 Marie Antoinette, plot to rescue, 163. 
 
 Marley Abbey (residence of "Vanessa"), 22. 
 
 Marshall, Judge, 23. 
 
 Massachusetts Historical Society, 53. 
 
 Mather, Rev. Cotton, U.TJ. 
 
 McKean, Elizabeth, 282. 
 
 McKean, Joseph, 280. 
 
 McKinstrey, Sarah, marries Caleb Stark, 79 ; por- 
 trait of, 84. 
 
 McNeil, Gen. John, 83. 
 
 Michelet, 231. 
 
 Minot, Captain, 327. 
 
 Morris, Robert, 82. 
 
 Morse, Rev. Jedediah, 265. 
 
 Morse, Samuel P. B., 83 ; birthplace of, 264 ; student 
 at Yale, 269 ; studies painting in Europe, 270 ; 
 returns to America, 272 ; paints Lafayette, 272 ; 
 invents the telegraph. 273. 
 
 Moulton, Mr. Charles, 288. 
 
 Moulton, Suzanne, 289. 
 
 Nason, Rev. Ellas, 41. 
 
 Newman, Robert, 116. 
 
 Nichols, George C., buys Royall House, 72. 
 
 Norris, Miss, 287. 
 
 Nourse, Rebecca, 228. 
 
 " Old Oaken Bucket," 356. 
 
 Orvis, John, marries Marianne Dwight, 303. 
 
 Ossoli, Angelo, Marchese d', 320. 
 
 Ossoli, Marchesa d' (See Margaret Fuller). 
 
 Otis, Harrison Gray, 257. 
 
 Oxford, death of Berkeley at, 34. 
 
 Page, Capt. Caleb, 76. 
 
 Pennsylvania Freeman, 372. 
 
 387 
 
INDEX 
 
 Pepperell, Sir William, 1st, 66. 
 
 Pepperell, Sir William, 2d, at Medford, 63 ; gradu- 
 ated, 68 ; marries Miss Royall, 68 ; denounced, 68 ; 
 sails for England, 68 ; dies, 69. 
 
 Pepperell, Lady, 85. 
 
 Pepperell House built, 66. 
 
 Percival, Lord, 13 ; letter from Walpole, 33. 
 
 Phips, Governor, 233. 
 
 Pickard, Elizabeth W., 366. 
 
 Pickard, Samuel, 374. 
 
 Pierce, Professor, 286. 
 
 Porter House in Medford, 131. 
 
 Prescott. Doctor, at Lexington, 114, 326. 
 
 Price, Rev. Roger, 48. 
 
 Pulling, Captain John, 106, 107, 110, 116. 
 
 Quebec, Baroness Riedesel at, 131. 
 
 Quincy, Miss, 120 ; marries John Hancock, 123. 
 
 Raben-Levetzan, Suzanne, 289. 
 
 Radcliffe College, 27!). 
 
 Radcliffe Magazine, 287. 
 
 Revere, Paul, 104, 110, 111 ; writes of Church, 156. 
 
 Revolution, Agnes Surriage in, 56. 
 
 Riedesel, Baron, 130 ; entertains Lafayette. 140 : vis- 
 its George Third, 142; returns to Brunswick, 145; 
 dies at Brunswick, 145. 
 
 Riedesel, Baroness, 130; letters of. 1M1 : lands in 
 America, 131: reaches Cambridge, 134; dies at 
 Berlin, 145 ; Cambridge street named for, 146. 
 
 Ripley, Doctor, :\:\\. 
 
 Ripley, George, 281 ; marries Sophia Dana, 293 ; 
 goes to Brook Farm, 295 ; visits Carlyle. 2!> ( .>. 
 
 Rouville. Maj. Hertel de. 192. 
 
 Royall House visited by Frankland, 45 ; built at 
 Medford. ;<. 
 
 Royall, Isaac, the nabob. 61. 
 
 Royall, Col. Isaac, proscribed, 69 ; leaves land to 
 Harvard, 70. 
 
 Russell. Major. 360. 
 
 Salem, Isaac Royall to sail from, 65. 
 
 Saltonstall. 2S5. 
 
 Sampson, Deborah (Gannett), 170; early life. 172: 
 enlists in Continental Army. 174: writes her 
 mother, 176; in battle of White Plains. 179; sex 
 discovered by physician. 181 ; receives love letter, 
 182 ; returns to her home, 188 ; marries, 188 ; 
 conducts lecture tour, 189. 
 
 Savage, 347. 
 
 Scituate. 358. 
 
 Scott. Sir Walter, 340. 
 
 Schuyler, General, at Saratoga. 132; daughter of, 135. 
 
 Sewall, Judge. 2:50. 
 
 Shirley, governor Massachusetts, 41. 
 
 Shirley House, 45. 
 
 388 
 
INDEX 
 
 Shurtleff, Robert (See Deborah Sampson). 
 
 Sleepy Hollow, 338, 339. 
 
 Smibert paints Berkeley, 35 ; paints Sir Wm. Pep- 
 perell, 1st, 67. 
 
 Smith, Mary, 368 ; marries S. F. Smith, 369. 
 
 Sophia, Princess, and Madame Riedesel, 144. 
 
 Sophocles, Evangelinus Apostolides, 287. 
 
 Sparhawk, Colonel, 66. 
 
 Stark, General, at Royall House, 71. 
 
 Stark, Archibald, 75. 
 
 Stark, Caleb, born at Dunbarton, 77 ; marries Miss 
 McKinstrey, 79 ; entertains Lafayette, 80. 
 
 Stark, Charlotte, 82. 
 
 Stark, Harriett, 82. 
 
 Stark, Charles F. Morris, 82. 
 
 Stark Burying-ground, 88. 
 
 Stella, journal of, 17 ; marriage to Swift, 20. 
 
 Story, Capt. William, 368. 
 
 Story, Judge, 286. 
 
 Story, Mary, 285. 
 
 Story, William, 285. 
 
 Sully steamship, 273. 
 
 Surriage, Agnes, 37. 
 
 Swan, Col. James, 159 ; member Sons of Liberty, 
 160 ; at Bunker Hill, 160 ; secretary Mass. Board 
 of War, 161 ; makes fortune, 161 ; loses fortune, 
 161 ; secures government contracts, 162 ; returns 
 to America, 164 ; arrested at Paris, 165 ; confined 
 in St. Pelagie, 166; dies, 168. 
 
 Swift, Dean, friend to Berkeley, 16; at lodging in 
 Bury Street, 17 ; letter to Vanessa, 21 ; letter to 
 Lord Carteret, 27. 
 
 Swift, Lindsay, 301. 
 
 Tai-Ping Rebellion, 346. 
 
 Thayer, Abijah W., 369. 
 
 Thaxter, Celia, 285. 
 
 Thaxter, Levi. 285. 
 
 Thoreau and Hawthorne. 335 ; grave of, 339. 
 
 Three Rivers. Baroness Riedesel at, 131. 
 
 Tidd, Jacob, buys Royall House, 72. 
 
 Titnba, the Indian slave. 229. 
 
 Titus. Mrs. Nelson V., 261. 
 
 Tremont House, 305. 
 
 TTrsuline Convent, 284. 
 
 Vane, Sir Harry, 215. 
 
 Vanessa (Cadenus and Vanessa). 19; goes to Ire- 
 land. 20 ; letter to Swift, 21 ; letter to Stella, 22 ; 
 legacy to Berkeley, 23 ; death of, 25. 
 
 Vanhomrigh, Esther (See Vanessa), 17. 
 
 Vassall House. 148 : becomes hospital, 149 ; Doctor 
 Church there confined, 150. 
 
 Vaudreuil, Governor, 200. 
 
 389 
 
INDEX 
 
 Walker, Lucretia P., 272. 
 
 Walpole, Sir Robert, 28; writes to Lord Percival, 33. 
 
 Ward, Elizabeth C., founds Chinese library, 355. 
 
 Ward, Frederick Townsend, born at Salem, 342 ; 
 enters French army, 343 ; enlists in Nicaraguan 
 expedition, 344 ; arrives at Shanghai, 344 ; de- 
 feats Tai-Pings, 347 : is made a mandarin, 349 ; 
 organises Ever-Victorious Army, 350 ; marries 
 Changmei, 350 ; buried at Ning Po, 352 ; is made 
 a god, 352. 
 
 Warren, Doctor, and Church, 157. 
 
 Warren, Mrs. Mercy, 100. 
 
 Washington, George, letter of, 88. 
 
 Wayside Inn, 49, 241. 
 
 Wentworth, Governor, marriage of, 248. 
 
 Wentworth, Michael, 249. 
 
 West, Benjamin, 270. 
 
 West Indies, proposed seminary at, 14. 
 
 Whitehall (built at Newport, R. I.), 11; made over 
 to Yale College, 33. 
 
 White, Maria, 285, 286. 
 
 Whitman, Mrs. Sarah, 290. 
 
 Whittier at Marblehead. 371 : at Philadelphia. 372 ; 
 " A Sea Dream," written by, 374 ; at Haverhill 
 Seminary reunion, 379 ; endows Amesbury Home, 
 366. 
 
 Williams, Gov. Charles K.. 208. 
 
 Williams, Rev. Eleazer (Dauphin?), 207. 
 
 Williams, Eunice, captured. 104; is converted by 
 Jesuits, 205 ; marries a savage, 205 ; revisits 
 Deerfleld, 205. 
 
 Williams, Rev. John, 193 ; captured, 194 ; redeemed, 
 203. 
 
 Williams. Roger. 22>. 
 
 Williams, Rev. Stephen. 198; captured by Indians, 
 194: redeemed. 203: settles at Longmeadow, 204. 
 
 Winthrop, John, 217. 
 
 Wiscasset. Me., plan to entertain Marie Antoinette 
 at. 1 <>:>>. 
 
 Woodworth. Samuel, born at Scituate, 359; writes 
 " Old Oaken Bucket," 362 ; dies, 364. 
 
 Yale College, bequest from Berkeley, 33 ; S. F. B. 
 Morse :it. 269. 
 
 Zenobia, 301. 
 
 390 
 
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