Chapter M: C. C (4)

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 womanhood, an Indian by whom she had a family of children. A few years after the war she made her first visit to her Deerfield relatives, 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 prayers and lengthy sermonising on the part of her clerical relatives, an address delivered at Mansfield August 1, 1741, by Solomon Williams, A. M., being frankly in her behalf. A portion of this sermon has come down to us, and offers a curious example of the eloquence of the time: "It has pleased God," says the worthy minister, "to incline her, the last summer and now again of her own accord, to make a visit to her friends; and this seems to encourage us to hope that He designs to answer the many prayers which have been put up for her."

But in spite of these many prayers, and in spite, too, of the fact that the General Court of Massachusetts granted Eunice and her family a piece of land on condition that they would remain in New England, she refused on the ground that it would endanger her soul. She lived and died in savage life, though nominally a convert to Romanism. Out of her singular fate has grown another romance, the marvel of later times. For from her descended Reverend Eleazer Williams, missionary to the Indians at Green Bay, Wisconsin, who was in 1851 visited by the Duc de Joinville, and told that he was that Dauphin (son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette), who, according to history, died in prison June 9, 1795. In spite of the fact that the evidence of this little prince's death was as strong as any which can be found in history in relation to the death of Louis, his father, or of Marie Antoinette, his mother, the strange story--first published in _Putnam's Magazine_ for February, 1853--gained general credence, even Mr. Williams himself coming gradually to believe it. As a matter of fact, however, there was proved to be a discrepancy of 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 Connecticut 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 Vermont, 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 Williams was of Indian extraction, and a descendant 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 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 French 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 Frenchwoman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was part English, part Yankee, part Indian, and part French, a combination sufficiently complex to account, perhaps, even for an unmistakably Bourbon chin.

NEW ENGLAND'S FIRST "CLUB WOMAN"

Even to-day, in this emancipated twentieth century, women ministers 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 salvation, 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 atmosphere 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 described as a "woman of ready wit and bold spirit."

While still young, this exceptionally gifted woman married William Hutchinson, a country gentleman of good character and estate, whose home was also in Lincolnshire. 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 inferior of his remarkable wife. In their Lincolnshire home the Hutchinsons had been parishioners of the Reverend John Cotton, and regular attendants at that celebrated divine's 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 Hutchinsons also decided to come to America, and presently the whole family did so. Mrs. Hutchinson's daughter, who had married the Reverend John Wright Wheelwright--another Lincolnshire minister who had suffered at the hands of Archbishop 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, unbalanced 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 questions, and she hinted in no uncertain way that when they should arrive in New England they might expect to hear more from her. Clearly, she regarded herself as one 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 Hutchinsons 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 privileges 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 opinions, Mrs. Hutchinson was subjected to a most searching examination. Finally, however, she, too, passed through the ordeal 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. Hutchinson 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 intellectuality as far superior to that of most members of her sex. Mrs. Hutchinson soon came, indeed, to be that very remarkable thing--a prophet honoured in her own community. Adopting an established custom 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 independent thought and action. To be sure, nothing more lively than the sermon preached the Sunday before was ever discussed 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 themselves went to the meetings. Cotton, Vane, Wheelwright, and Coddington, completely 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 "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 expression 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: "She held and advocated as the highest truth," writes Mr. 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 denied 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 advancing these views, Mrs. Hutchinson's pronounced personal magnetism stood her in good stead. She made many converts, and, believing herself inspired to do a certain work, and emboldened by the increasing number of her followers, she soon became unwisely and unpleasantly aggressive in her criticisms of those ministers who preached a covenant of works. She seems to have been led into speaking her 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 successfully parried.

It looked indeed as if she would surely be acquitted, when by an impassioned discourse 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 she was banished "as unfit for our society." In the colony records of Massachusetts the sentence pronounced reads as follows: "Mrs. Hutchinson (the wife of Mr. William Hutchinson) being convented for traducing the ministers and their ministry in this country, shee declared voluntarily her revelations for her ground, and that shee should bee delivred and the Court ruined with their posterity; and thereupon was banished, and the meanwhile she was committed to Mr. Joseph Weld untill the Court shall dispose of her."

Mrs. Hutchinson passed next winter accordingly 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 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. Winthrop, who presided, catechised her mercilessly, and all endeavoured to extort from her some damaging admission. But in this they were unsuccessful. "Mrs. Hutchinson can tell when to speak and when to 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 proceedings as preserved in the "History of Massachusetts Under the Colony and Province," written by Governor Hutchinson, a descendant of our heroine, will be quick to condemn the judgment there pronounced 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 pronounced, and after the church which had so lately caressed and courted Mrs. Hutchinson 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 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 adjudged 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 banishment, she went with her family into the Dutch territory of New Netherlands, settling near what is now New Rochelle. And scarcely had she become established in this place when her house was suddenly assaulted by hostile Indians, who, in their revengeful fury, murdered the whole family, 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 remarkable intellect Boston has ever made historic by misunderstanding.

Hawthorne, in writing in his early manhood of Mrs. Hutchinson ("Biographical Sketches"), humourously remarked, Seer that he was: "There are portentous indications, 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.

IN THE REIGN OF THE WITCHES

One of the most interesting of the phenomena to be noted by the student 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 universally called the Old Witch House, situated at the corner of Essex and North Streets, Salem. A dark, scowling building, set far enough back from the street 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 witchcraft, 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 during his troubled settlement in Salem. The people of Salem, it will be remembered, persistently sought Williams as their spiritual pastor and master until the General Court at Boston unseated the Salem deputies for the acts of their constituents in retaining a man of whom they disapproved, and the magistrates sent a vessel to Salem to remove Mr. Williams 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 governor'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 picture to make his way to freedom, Williams had no guide save a pocket compass, which his descendants still exhibit, and no reliance 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 Corwin, 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 accused of being a witch--why, one is unable to find out. The jury was convinced 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 homestead, 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 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 history. But this was by no means the end of the matter. The "afflicted children" in Salem who had made trouble before now began to accuse men and women of unimpeachable character. Within a few months several hundred people were arrested and thrown into jails. As Governor Hutchinson, 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 Terror, men of property and position lived in the hourly fear of being regarded as "a suspect," and frequently threw suspicion on their neighbours the better to retain 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 meetings, 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."

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, perhaps, but what in those days was called a witch disease. A witch then had to be found to account for the disease; a scapegoat must of necessity be brought forward. Some poor old woman was thereupon picked out and subjected to atrocious torture. If she "confessed," the torture ceased. Naturally she very often "confessed," thus implicating others and damning herself. Negative suggestion this modern psychologist likewise offers as light upon witchcraft. The witches seldom cried, no matter what their anguish of mind might be. The inquisitors used to say to them then, "If you're not 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 everybody 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 adjective "good," wrote to Governor Phips a letter which shows that she admitted witchcraft as a thing unquestioned.

It is in connection with the witchcraft delusion in Salem that we get the one instance in New England of the old English penalty for contumacy, that of a victim's being pressed to death. Giles Corey, who believed in witchcraft and was instrumental 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 convicted 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, followed 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 the first denounced the witchcraft excitement, trying to persuade her husband, who believed all the monstrous stories then current, not to attend the hearings or in any way countenance the proceedings. Perhaps 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 suddenly 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," was her sensible answer. But good sense was not much regarded at witch trials, and she was convicted and not long afterward executed. Her husband's evidence, which went 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 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 performance, 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 testified against his wife, and he was now as sure that she was guiltless as that he himself was. Bitter, indeed, must have been the realisation that he had helped convict her. But he atoned, as has been said, to her and to his children by subjecting himself 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 foundation for the statement that some were burned_.

The revulsion that followed the cessation of the delusion was as marked as was the precipitation that characterised the proceedings. Many of the clergy concerned 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 timbers. The front door and the overhanging 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.

LADY WENTWORTH OF THE HALL

On one of those pleasant long evenings, 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 has 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
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 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 memorable 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 portrait, 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,
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 flights 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 Portsmouth. The exterior of the mansion as it looks to-day does not of itself live up to one's preconceived idea of colonial magnificence. A rambling collection of buildings, seemingly the result of various "L" expansions, form an inharmonious whole 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 picture 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 damask-covered furniture, and the sedan-chair, all exhaling an atmosphere of old-time splendour and luxury. Something of impressiveness has recently been introduced into the interior by the artistic arrangement 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:

"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 tradition says that very shortly after her marriage Martha dropped her ring and summoned one of her late kitchen colleagues to rescue it from the floor. But the colleague had quickly become shortsighted, and Martha, dismissing her hastily, picked up the circlet herself.

Before the Reverend Arthur Brown was gathered to his fathers, he had another opportunity to marry the fascinating Martha to another Wentworth, a man of real soldierly distinction. Her second husband 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 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 "capture" 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 historical perspective.

AN HISTORIC TRAGEDY

One hundred years ago there was committed 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 homestead 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 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 executed 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 quarter before three with his usual steadiness, 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 committed suicide, and that an innocent man was punished for a crime he could never have perpetrated.

In the trial it was shown that this beautiful 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 venerable Fairbanks house. None the less, they had been in the habit of meeting frequently, 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 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 appeared to have declared legally her intention to marry him.

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 thinking, and thinking to some purpose, of what cares and expense the future might bring them. The man, if he was an honourable 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 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 Massachusetts--no others, in fact, than Harrison 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 terrible 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 murderous blows from her hand, for the very reason that he had attempted (unsuccessfully, inasmuch as his right arm was impaired) 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 hopeless 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 possibility of their forming any such attachment 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. From the court-room he was taken to the Dedham gaol, but on the night of the seventeenth of August he was enabled 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" ultimately asserted itself is said to have been constructed of a tree cut from the old Fairbanks place.

The Fairbanks house is still standing, having been occupied for almost two hundred and seventy-five years by the same family, which is now in the eighth generation 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 seventy-five years, who will occupy it throughout her lifetime, although the place is controlled by the Fairbanks Chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution, who hold their monthly meetings there.

The way in which this property was acquired by the organisation named is interesting 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. Nelson 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 immediately 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 summer to see the interesting old house, which stands nestling cosily in a grassy dell just at the corner of East Street and the short "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 ancestors 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 Congregational church in Dedham, they went persistently by the longest way round rather than tolerate the road to which they had objected.

That their neighbours called them "set in their ways" goes, of course, without saying, but the women of the Fairbanks family have ever been rigidly conscientious, and the men a bit obstinate. For, much as one would like to think the contrary 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.

INVENTOR MORSE'S UNFULFILLED AMBITION

The first house erected in Charlestown after the destruction of the village by fire in 1775 (the coup d'état which immediately followed the battle of Bunker Hill, it will be remembered), 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 tribute to the memory of the babe that there drew his first breath on April 27, 1791.

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 inauguration 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 determined to build a parsonage, and during the construction of this dwelling Doctor Morse accepted the hospitality of Mr. Thomas Edes, who then owned the "oldest" 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 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 in point of bands and handkerchiefs, if this report could be contradicted; but if it cannot, oh, how heavy will be the disappointment. When a young clergyman settles 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?'"[10]

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 forward with decided interest to his settling among them. We can even fancy that the girls of the sewing society studied 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 recitation 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 passion 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 considerable distance) his beloved mistress. His penchant for painting, exhibited 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 lecture upon his waste of time, violation of college laws, and filial disobedience, without 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 age of nineteen, of the landing of the Pilgrims, which may be seen at the Charlestown City Hall, is certainly not a masterpiece. 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.