orton, his wife and daughter. Norton
was born in Berlin, Conn., in 1716; was graduated at Yale College in
1737; was ordained in Fall Town, since Bernardston, Mass., in 1741; he
was the first minister in that town, "but owing to the unsettled state
of the times," and to the fact that his people lay right in the angle
between the military line of the Connecticut and that of the Deerfield,
and had consequently as much as they could do, to maintain their
families exposed as they were, he labored there about four years, and
was appointed chaplain to the line of forts almost as soon as the men
were fairly in garrison. He was in Fort Massachusetts when it was
besieged and captured by an army of French and Indians in August, 1746;
went captive with the rest of the garrison to Quebec; returned,
exchanged, in just a year; and wrote an account of the siege, the
journey northwards, the captivity, and the return, a precious little
book, which he entitled after a memorable precedent "The Redeemed
Captive." His narrative begins as follows.--"Thursday, August 14, 1746,
I left Fort Shirley in company with Dr. Williams and about fourteen of
the soldiers; we went to Pelham Fort, and from thence to Captain Rice's,
where we lodged that night. Friday, the 15th, we went from thence to
Fort Massachusetts, where I designed to have tarried about a month.
Saturday, 16th, the Doctor with fourteen men, went off for Deerfield,
and left in the fort Sergeant John Hawks with twenty soldiers, about
half of them sick with bloody flux."

We can not now follow the good chaplain in his deeply interesting
narrative. He makes no mention in it of his family, but it is certain
from other data that he left Mrs. Norton and his young children in
garrison at Fort Shirley, and that just about the time of his return
from captivity to Boston, which was August 16, 1747, his little girl,
Anna, died at the fort and was buried in the field a little to the west
of it. Probably some soldier in the fort chiselled upon the rude stone
the inscription as follows:

Hear lys ye body of An'na
D: of ye Rev:
Mr. John Norton. She died
Aug; ye ---- aged ---- 1747.

This stone stood there in the bleak field exposed to the suns of summer
and the storms of winter for more than one hundred and thirty years. The
day of August on which she died and the number of years she had lived
have become illegible by exposure,--impossible to be deciphered. The
stone has lately been re