about the foot of certain hills, and its greatest edifice crowns the summit of the tallest of them, throwing back the warm rays of the western sun from the rounded outline of its golden dome. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of men

throng the streets. Can it be that one among all these feels more lonely than the first man who built his little cabin on the spot when all was wild and nature reigned over the hill and the shores of the sea that washed them?

What an interest surrounds the first man to do anything, or to establish himself at any particular point! How we search records to find out who has been before us, and how triumphant are we when we make a discovery! Could we now give the name of the man who, first of all, lived on the site where London stands, with what sentiments of reverence would we not gaze upon the record of his life!

We are fortunate enough to know the name of the first man who lighted a fire on a hearthstone in the city I am thinking of. When the smoke rose from his chimney, it was seen by none but In

dians and the wild beasts of the surrounding forest.

It is not often that a single man settles alone away from his fellow men and builds himself a home for meditation as this man did. There is generally some romantic reason for his act, if he does so; and, in our case, we shall find ourselves wondering why a man like this one should have made himself an exception to the general rules of human action. He is introduced to us as sitting alone upon the summit of Shawmut, the site upon which Boston was built. It was Beacon Hill from which his eyes gazed across the harbor to the broad Atlantic, over which he had come from his native England. Was he longing to return? I am sure that he did not entertain any feeling of that sort. He rather said to himself:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture in the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea and music of its roar:

I love not man the less, but nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

What caused this man, William Blaxton by name, to leave his native England, and seek a home alone on the slope of Beacon Hill? He seems to have arrived some four years after the Pilgrims had established themselves at Plymouth. He was about twenty-five years of age, a graduate of Emanuel College, Cambridge, and a clergyman of the Established Church. Had some disappointment caused him to leave his home

to exchange its comforts for the privations of the wilderness? Did he come for the purpose of quiet contemplation and study? Perhaps both reasons influenced him. He had with him a library of some value. It contained English books in folio, Latin books in folio, in large quarto and in small quarto, and some manuscript volumes, which would be of the greatest interest to us if they had not been burned by the Indians.

How many years Blaxton lived without neighbors I cannot tell; but I know that in 1629 he had one named Walford, living in a palisadoed house on the spot where Charlestown now stands; and that a little later Samuel Maverick was to be

"

found at Noddle's Island, now East Boston; and even earlier than that there had been an Englishman at Mount Wollaston, which he had called Merrymount.

The settler at the last-mentioned place had surrounded himself with companions. He did not come to America to get away from society, but rather to be free to behave himself as he pleased. He was a gay and, perhaps, graceless fellow, and his gayeties at last aroused the antagonism of the settlers about him, who sent the valiant Pilgrim, Miles Standish, with soldiers to force him to live more soberly. He had raised a Maypole at Merrymount, and with his companions he danced around it in a way that was not in accord with the views of the stricter settlers. at Plymouth and Charlestown, who did not dance at all, and were a constant protest against the vanities and the license that they had come over seas to get away from. Those were stirring times in England at the epoch that we are considering. There was a war with France, and King Charles the First was in dispute with his Parliament. Oliver Cromwell