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Wrentham, Massachusetts, is associated with nearly all of my joys and sorrows. For many years Red Farm, by King Philip's Pond, the home of Mr. J. E. Chamberlin and his family, was my home. I remember with deepest gratitude the kindness of these dear friends and the happy days I spent with them. The sweet companionship of their children meant much to me.

Doddridge! How could any wife be jealous when her husband finishes off with such a compliment to herself? But to return to the good Mrs. Steffe, of whom I am, on my mother’s side, a descendant. I must add that as there were great men before Agamemnon, so there were good people in the little village of Wrentham before Mrs. Steffe appeared upon the scene.

It is clear that there was no such intellectual phenomenon in all London under the Stuarts as that little Wrentham lad. Of that village, when I came into the world, my father was the honoured, laborious and successful minister.

In sum, an intellectus universalis beyond all that we reade of Picus Mirandula, and other precoce witts, and yet withal a very humble child.’ This prodigy was the son of the Rev. Henry Wotton, minister of Wrentham, Suffolk. Sir William Skippon, a parishioner, in a letter yet extant, describes the wonderful achievements of the little fellow when but five years old.

I confess the advent of this young Thompson from Framlingham was a great event in our small family circle. In the first place he came from a town, and that at once gave him a marked superiority. Then his father kept a horse and gig, for it was thus young Thompson came to Wrentham, and all the world over a gig has been a symbol of the respectability dear to the British heart; and he had been for that time and as an only son carefully and intelligently trained by one of the family who, in the person of the late Edward Miall, founder of the Nonconformist, and M.P. for Bradford, was supposed to be the incarnation of what was termed the dissidence of Dissent. Young Thompson was also what would be called a genteel youth, and gave me ideas as to wearing straps to my trousers, oiling my hair, and generally adorning my person, which had never entered into my unsophisticated head. He also had been to London, and as Framlingham was some twenty miles nearer the Metropolisthe centre of intelligencethan Wrentham, the intelligence of a Framlingham lad was of course expected,

In the first place, I was born at Wrentham, though at a considerably later period of time than 1667; and, secondly, if he was a barren planthe of whom we read, in Harmer’s Miscellaneous Works, that ‘he was a gentleman of fortune and education, very zealous for the Congregational plan of church government and discipline, and a sufferer in its bonds for a good conscience’what am I?

During this terrible war there were many deeds of heroic courage performed which merit record. A man by the name of Rocket, in the town of Wrentham, was in the woods searching for his horse. Much to his alarm, he discovered, far off in the forest, a band of forty-two Indians, in single file, silently and noiselessly passing along, apparently seeking a place of concealment.

Many were the men, for instance, who, even as far off as Wrentham, went herring or mackerel fishing in the big craft, which, drawn up on the beach when the season was over, seemed to me ships such as never had been seen by the mariners of Tyre and Sidon; but the chief interest to me were the vans in which the fish were carried from Lowestoft to Londonlight spring-carts with four wheels and two horses, that, after changing horses at our Spread Eagle, raced like lightning along the turnpike-road, at all hours, and even on Sundays—a sad grievance to the godlybeating the Yarmouth mail.

The correspondence in due time, however, naturally ceased, as it was chiefly controversial, and nothing can be more irksome than for two people who have made up their minds, and whom nothing can change, to be arguing continually, and the friendship between them in some sense ceased as the one remained firm to, and the other wandered farther and farther from, the modified Calvinism of the Wrentham Church and pulpit, where, as in all orthodox pulpits at that time, it was taught that men were villains by necessity, and fools, as it were, by a Divine thrusting on; that for some a Saviour had been crucified, that there might be a way of escape from the wrath of an angry and unforgiving God; whilst for the vast massto whom the name of Christ had never been made known, to whom the Bible had never been sentthere was an impending doom, the awful horror of which no tongue could tell, no imagination conceive.

Had I the skill and license of a novelist, I could have made much of my little mystery; but there are many now living who remember all these things, and then, I am a soldier, and too old for a new business. So I make as much of them as there was and no more. In private theatricals, an evening at the Harbor, I had won applause with the rig, wig, and dialect of my trip to Wrentham Square.