after his arrival, was
tried and convicted of making an unlawful _impression_ upon Mr. Green's
daughter. The charge in the indictment was 'for alluring the daughter of
Mr. Samuel Green, printer, and drawing away her affection, without the
consent of her father.' This was a direct breach of the law of the
colony; for in those good times, no young lady might venture to fall in
love without, like a dutiful child, asking her father's consent. But
Johnson was doubly guilty, since he had a wife in England. He was
therefore fined five pounds, and ordered to go home to his first love.
This order, however, was for a time evaded; and he afterward found means
of procuring a reconciliation with Green--his wife having probably died
in the mean time--and of entering into a partnership with the father of
his American charmer. Her prudent father, however, as is most likely,
obliged her to leave off loving him, since the chronicles of those days
say that the inconstant typographer was married in 1770 to Ruth Cane of
Cambridge. He then began to look up in the world, and was elected to the
office of constable, which in those days was much more elevated than
that of sheriff is now.

In 1674 the first press was established in Boston by permission of the
General Court; and two additional licensers were appointed--one of whom
was the Rev. Increase Mather. The printer was John Foster, who was also
somewhat of an astronomer. He made and printed almanacs; but died at the
early age of thirty-three. He was a man of so much consideration that
two poems were published on the occasion of his death. One of them
concluded with the following lines:

'This body, which no activeness did lack,
Now 's laid aside like an old almanack;--
But for the present 's only out of date,
'Twill have at length a far more active state.
Yea, though with dust thy body soiled be,
Yet at the resurrection we shall see
A fair EDITION, and of matchless worth,
Free from ERRATAS, new in Heaven set forth;
'Tis but a word from God, the Great Creator,
It shall be done, when he saith IMPRIMATUR.'

'Whoever,' says Isaiah Thomas, 'has read the celebrated epitaph of
Franklin on himself, will have some suspicion that it was taken from
this original.'

One of Green's apprentices was an Indian lad, who became master of the
business, and assisted in printing Eliot's Indian Bible. When King
Philip's war came on, however, his bosom was fired with _amor pat