measurements may be assigned to that part of his narrative which he calls "lively," his report of the general excellence of the site belongs to that part which may be termed "true." We know the place as it was two hundred and fifty years ago. A miscellaneous growth of trees alder, poplar, pine, white oak, and hickory-stretched across the township. The streams on its borders so abounded in fish that the sturgeon gave name to the Merrimack. The harbor was inviting and ample for the small craft of the times. The general level, varied with hill and easy slope, offered a wide range of fertile "meadow, marsh, and upland." Green islands dotted the bosom of the Merrimack and skirted the harbor. The northward outlook from the hilltops terminated with the round. summit of Agamenticus, while eastward the glistening waters of the ocean stretched boundlessly away. Blackbirds, woodpeckers, jays, and crows filled the air with their notes. Wolves prowled around, and foxes, red and silver-gray, ranged the fields and forests. For a century yet was the straggling moose to be shot on the northern bank of the Merrimack and wandering wild geese killed on Plum Island; while later still the occasional bear crossed Ilsley's Hill and the wild deer hurried through the streets of West Newbury to the woods of Cape Ann. “Great Tom the Indian" now had his wigwam by Indian Hill, "John Indian" apparently near the "Lower Green," and John Perkins, no doubt, was tending his fish traps on the Quascacunquen. Such was the sylvan scene. Meanwhile a band of

settlers was wintering in Agawam and waiting only for the spring to disturb the solitude of John Perkins and in due time to buy out all the "right, title, and interest" held by Great Tom and his congeners in the "woods, commons, and lands" of old Newbury.

The township names of this whole region around us betray the origin of its colonists. In a narrow belt that stretches across the southern countries of England lie the towns of Newbury, Salisbury, Marlborough, Amesbury, and Bradford; while in another belt, some forty miles to the north, are the towns of Ipswich, Haverhill, Byfield, and Hampton. It marks the affectionate memories still clinging to the mother land that these became names of the new homes beyond the ocean and were, most of them, again transplanted to the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont.

The ninety-one first proprietors - not all first settlers - of Newbury were a colony complete and well equipped. They represented the best working forces. of southern England. There There were two scholarly ministers, several landowners and men of property, two or three merchants, "yeomen," carpenters, tanners, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, shoemakers, weavers, a physician, a sea captain and mate, a cooper, a saddler, a dyer, even a glover, and last but not least—a maltster. Old families of England were represented in some of their younger branches, who had turned Puritan and come hither to seek their fortunes. The University of Oxford, which lies just midway between Newbury and Byfield in England — thirty miles from

each

contributed its share in the persons of Thomas Parker and James Noyes, the one a student of Magdalen, the other of Brasenose College, the former bearing the reputation of eminent scholarship, the latter "well skilled in Greek, and well read in the Schoolmen and Fathers."

Such was the goodly company of which the first band some twenty-three in number, with their families might have been seen one morning in the spring of 1635 sailing through Plum Island Sound and up Parker River to a spot on the northern bank a hundred rods below the present bridge. And there Nicholas Noyes first leaped on shore.

Unfortunately the men who make history seldom write it. Of the new experiences and stirring events one characteristic fact alone is handed down. On a Sunday, perhaps in June, we might have seen them. gathered beneath a spreading oak to listen to a sermon on church polity and discipline, then joining in solemn covenant and by vote of the uplifted hand electing Thomas Parker and James Noyes their pastor and teacher. All the stir of active life began at once: a meetinghouse erected and a house for the ministers, house lots assigned within a half-mile of the meetinghouse, planting lots, meadow lots, and a great tract for pasturage laid out, an ordinary licensed, and, before the year's end, the birth of Mary Brown, the first white child.

With the assembling of the Long Parliament in 1640 and the impeachment of Strafford and Laud all

emigration ceased. But Old Newbury had now become a well-organized settlement, with its mill at the Falls and its ferry at Carr's Island, with its town meetings and fines for non-attendance, its seven men or selectmen, its constables and highway surveyors, its physician exempt from taxes, its schoolmaster, its public notary and register, its merchants, its herdsmen, haywards and shipmaster, its pound for stray cattle and its stocks for bad men, its sentinels to stand guard "with arms complete" during church service, and its politics so high that ten of its freemen footed it forty miles to Cambridge to elect John Winthrop governor and defeat Henry Vane.

It was the auspicious beginning of an intelligent, active, and thriving community. They grappled at once with the new work of their changed condition, and rapidly cleared themselves of the bondage of the past. It is difficult for us to conceive the vast transition from the humdrum of stereotyped village life in England to the bustle and whirl of a new colony in America. It was a forthputting in every line of action and of legislation. The early records tell the tale of incessant, multifarious enterprise the busy hum of the young swarm in the new hive. It is a story of grants, boundaries, taxes, exemptions, farms, mills, bridges, wharves, highways, and ordinaries, offers to capitalists and settlers, encouragement to physicians and schoolmasters, to fishermen and tanners, provision for the poor, care of the public lands and timber, and bounties on the birds and beasts destructive to flocks and crops, and the

universal oversight of the public morals. Nothing was beyond the range of the town meeting and the selectmen. But the church and the school were the pet themes.

With what loving minuteness did they legislate on the location of the meetinghouse, the pay of the minister, the construction of the galleries, the admission of pews, the seating of all the worshipers, the purchase of a bell, the choice of a bellman and the sending of a boy to tell him when to ring the first and second bells, with a flag to be hung out at the first and taken in at the second, the tolling of the bell till the minister came, the nine o'clock bell at night, the winging down of the principal seats after sweeping, the appointment of a precentor to "tune the psalm," and even the seat he should occupy, "the fore seat in the south body," the employment of tithing men to see that all the families "attend the public worship of God," and, alas! to keep the boys in order when there. And with what strenuous and persistent earnestness did they maintain the graver matters of religion and the church!

And next the church in their thoughts lay the school. One of the first ministers was the first schoolmaster. In three years came Anthony Somerby, encouraged “to keep school for one year" by the grant of "four acres of upland and six acres of salt marsh." Symbolically enough the school was first kept in the meetinghouse, then for a time in the watchhouse, then in private residences, and at length in the schoolhouse proper. The successive bargains with the schoolmaster and