ories.

1758. "Thomas Mansfield, Esquire, was thrown from his horse on Friday,
January 6, and died the next Sunday.

"A company of soldiers, from Lynn, marched for Canada, on the
twenty-third of May. Edmund Ingalls and Samuel Mudge were killed.

"In a thunder-shower, on the fourth of August, an ox belonging to Mr.
Henry Silsbee was killed by lightning.

"A sloop from Lynn, commanded by Captain Ralph Lindsay, was cast away on
the fifteenth of August, near Portsmouth."

In this pretended "History," the whole of the eighteenth century
receives but sixty-two pages, and that part of the nineteenth which had
elapsed at the time of publication receives only one hundred and
seventeen. In the latter an average entry is the following, under date
of 1856:--

"Patrick Buckley, the 'Lynn Buck,' ran five miles in twenty-eight
minutes and thirty-eight seconds, at the Trotting Park, for a belt
valued at fifty dollars. And on the fourth of December, William Hendley
ran the same distance in twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds."

The "Lynn Buck," seems to have been an important personage in those
days, for we read under date of 1858:--

"The 'Lynn Buck,' so called, walked a plank at Lowell, in February, a
hundred and five consecutive hours and forty-four minutes, and with but
twenty-nine minutes' rest. A strict watch was kept on him."

We are very glad to know about the "strict watch," but really it was too
bad of the authors not to let us know if those forty-four minutes, also,
were not consecutive. They might, too, have told us to advantage
something about the _modus operandi_ of "walking a plank." It has been
the general impression that the man who walks a plank performs the
operation in an unpleasant hurry--unpleasant for him; and that he will
take all the rest he can get--before he begins; and that he has an
eternal rest, or unrest, after he has finished. But perhaps this has
been a wrong impression. If the authors are alive, it is due to the
public that they should rise and explain.

Enough of pleasantry. Let us examine the book with serious mind, if we
can. Everybody knows that shoes have been the making of Lynn, that they
are and have been for years the backbone of its prosperity, the life of
its business. To say that Lynn is the greatest shoe-manufacturing city
in the country, and, for that matter, in the world, may be an
exaggeration, but it is a very common one. In a history of Lynn we might
expect this fact to