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Berry died, leaving Lincoln the debts of the firm, twelve hundred dollars, to him an appalling sum, which he humorously called "the national debt"; and on which he continued to make payments when he could for the next fifteen years. For a time he was postmaster of New Salem, an office so small that Andrew Jackson must have overlooked it.
There is no mention of this transaction in the Records of the Council. Phips makes no reference to it in his letter of the fourteenth of October, which is remarkable, as it would have been to his purpose, in explaining the grounds of his procedure, in organizing, and putting into operation, the judicial tribunal at Salem.
There he lived a year or two in a little red cottage upon the "Stockbridge Bowl", as a small lake near that town is called. In this retreat he wrote The House of the Seven Gables, which more deeply confirmed the literary position already acquired for him by the first romance. The scene is laid in Salem, as if he could not escape a strange fascination in the witch-haunted town of our early history.
She had come honestly enough by her gifts, her father having married the daughter of an able townsman of Salem, in the Massachusetts colony, when he had gone north after his first great success in court. Now the poor lady sat in a padded armchair from morning to night, beside the hearth in winter, and under the trees in summer, by reason of a fall she had had. There she knitted all the day long.
But, as was his wont, the storm of wrath soon subsided; his purpose, however, under the circumstances, as brave as it was wise and just, was, as the result showed, unalterable. He communicated to the Judges, personally, that they must sit no more, at Salem or elsewhere, to try cases of witchcraft; and that no more arrests must be made, on that charge.
Four trees are wanted for the keel which altogether will measure 146 feet in length, and hew sixteen inches square." This handsome frigate privately built by patriots of the republic illuminates the coastwise spirit and conditions of her time. She was a Salem ship from keel to truck.
At the close of his term on the District he was appointed to Oconomowoc, next to Waukesha, and the year following to Hart Prairie. Here his health utterly broke down, and at the following session of the Conference in 1868, he was compelled to take a superannuated relation. He now removed to Salem, in Kenosha County, where he died March 13, 1869, aged forty-seven.
Notwithstanding the zeal and emulation aroused by the appeal to Salem municipal pride, and notwithstanding the comparative rapidity with which ships could then be built, the Essex in her day illustrated the folly of deferring preparation until hostilities are at hand.
This was the origin of Salem; for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it "proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by interpretation, the bosom of consolation."
If she ever sailed off Great Misery Island, the crew of a run-under Salem fishing smack would rise up to curse the schooner's company. And that curse would follow those who sailed aboard her either for'ard or in the afterguard for all time.
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