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flows fresh and strong in sympathetic hearts! We celebrate to-day the valor that achieved our liberties without a thought of bitterness toward those from whom we inherited and from whom we wrested them - very Britons from very Britons.

And let us also rejoice to-day that these Centennial commemorations have come in to throw the veil over later and bloodier wounds that Concord and Bunker Hill and Bennington are superimposed upon Antietam and Gettysburg and the Wilderness. It is well that bygones should at length be bygones. There were many who thought that for their slaughter of a million lives and their assaults upon the nation's life a dozen chief criminals should have hung between the heavens and the earth. But it was not so done. Another policy prevailed. This mighty nation, of all the nations of the earth, could pardon and yet live. The cup was full of bitterness but we drank it down, and now we may throw away the dregs. For southern soldiers have. strewn their flowers on the graves of their northern conquerors, and the southern governor of South Carolina has pledged protection to the liberated slave. As in 1777 the tide of battle turned, so in 1877 at length has turned the tide of peace. This year, for the first time in our national history, the work of our earlier and our later great wars of this eventful century is accomplished. We dwell at last in "a real and homogeneous union of free commonwealths into one harmonious republic, where no sovereign state is pinned to its fellows by federal bayonets," and no fugitive for

liberty is remanded by federal courts to his chains; but American citizens are everywhere free to govern themselves. We look hopefully down the broad opening vista of peace, progress, and prosperity. What tongue dares foreshadow the tale which, if God will, shall be told here one hundred years hence this day?

Ultima Cumai venit jam carminis ætas;
Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.

All honor to the brave and honest Chief Magistrate1 who after a decade of fruitless experiment and smoldering strife had the good manhood to break away from all narrow and partisan restraints, cast himself upon the sound sense and Christian sentiment of the American people, and lead off this new order of the centuries! And let the East and the West and the North and the South say, Amen! and Amen!

1 President Hayes was present.

OLD NEWBURY.

AN ORATION AT THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT OF NEWBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, JUNE 10, 1885.

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N the twenty-ninth of December, 1634, the town of Agawam consented "that John Perkins, junior should build a weir on the river Quascacunquen." But "in case a plantation should there settle, he is to submit himself to such conditions as shall by them be imposed."

This proviso was a prophecy. Already the eye of the colonist was fixed upon the spot. The praises of the place had been sounded in the mother country. One William Wood had returned to England in 1633, after four years' residence in Massachusetts, and published in London "a true, lively, and experimental description of that part of America commonly called New England." In his review of all the settlements, actual and prospective, he reserves his choicest for the last. "Agawam," he says, "is the best place but one, which is Merrimack, lying eight miles beyond it, where is a river twenty leagues navigable. All along the river are fresh marshes, in some places three miles broad. In this river is sturgeon, salmon, and bass, and divers other kinds of fishes. To conclude, the country hath not that which this place doth not yield."

His Merrimack was our Newbury. And while his

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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 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 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

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