corded pauper workhouse--though not in connection with her poets, as
might naturally be supposed. The building was completed and tenanted in
1716. Seven years later, an act was passed in England authorizing the
establishment of parish workhouses there. The first and only keeper of
the Portsmouth almshouse up to 1750 was a woman--Rebecca Austin.

Speaking of first things, we are told by Mr. Nathaniel Adams, in his
"Annals of Portsmouth," that on the 20th of April, 1761, Mr. John
Stavers began running a stage from that town to Boston. The carriage was
a two-horse curricle, wide enough to accommodate three passengers. The
fare was thirteen shillings and sixpence sterling per head. The curricle
was presently superseded by a series of fat yellow coaches, one of
which--nearly a century later, and long after that pleasant mode of
travel had fallen obsolete--was the cause of much mental tribulation (1.
Some idle reader here and there may possibly recall the burning of
the old stage-coach in The Story of a Bad Boy.) to the writer of this
chronicle.

The mail and the newspaper are closely associated factors in
civilization, so I mention them together, though in this case the
newspaper antedated the mail-coach about five years. On October 7, 1756,
the first number of "The New Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle"
was issued in Portsmouth from the press of Daniel Fowle, who in the
previous July had removed from Boston, where he had undergone a brief
but uncongenial imprisonment on suspicion of having printed a pamphlet
entitled "The Monster of Monsters, by Tom Thumb, Esq.," an essay
that contained some uncomplimentary reflections on several official
personages. The "Gazette" was the pioneer journal of the province. It
was followed at the close of the same year by "The Mercury and Weekly
Advertiser," published by a former apprentice of Fowle, a certain
Thomas Furber, backed by a number of restless Whigs, who considered the
"Gazette" not sufficiently outspoken in the cause of liberty. Mr. Fowle,
however, contrived to hold his own until the day of his death. Fowle
had for pressman a faithful negro named Primus, a full-blooded African.
Whether Primus was a freeman or a slave I am unable to state. He lived
to a great age, and was a prominent figure among the people of his own
color.

Negro slavery was common in New England at that period. In 1767,
Portsmouth numbered in its population a hundred and eighty-eight slaves,
male and