le-crowned
progenitor,--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and
trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a
figure, as a man of war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself,
whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter
persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their
histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman
of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any
record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too,
inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in
the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to
have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry
bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if
they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these
ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of
Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the
heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events,
I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I
have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race,
for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and
henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans
would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins,
that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family
tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its
topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever
cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine--if my
life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by
success--would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively
disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers
to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in
life--what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in
his day and generation--may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might
as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied between
my great-grandsires and myself, across the