h as to the date. The
_Genealogical Register,_ under the charge of a Mr. Drake, in two
articles criticized my inscription. I replied in the _Register_ and
ended my article with a sentence which Drake struck out. The sentence
was this: _"The testimony of President Wadsworth as to the time of his
father's death is of more value than all the theories of all the
genealogists who have existed since their vocation was so justly
condemned by St. Paul."_

A few months later I appeared in the court to try a case which involved
my client's reputation for truth, and a thousand dollars in money. To
my dismay I saw that Drake was foreman of the jury. I lost my case,
but I think justly upon the evidence. My principal witness failed to
make good upon the stand the statement that he had made to me in my
office. One of the perils in the practice of law is that clients and
clients' witnesses either make misstatements or fail to make full
statements of the facts.

In the middle-third part of the nineteenth century, the date of
Sudbury Fight was a topic of serious controversy by genealogists and
historians. I was responsible for the date that appears upon the
monument that was erected in the year 1852. The conclusion that I had
reached was condemned by the _Genealogical Register_ and by a committee
of the Society. In the year 1866 I reviewed the evidence, on which my
opponents relied, and I marshaled the evidence in support of the
accuracy of the date that appeared upon the monument. In the year 1876
the town of Sudbury observed the bi-centennial on the 18th day of
April, thus giving sanction to the date on the monument.

At the dedication of the Sudbury monument I made the following address:

ADDRESS

Families, races and nations of men appear, act their respective parts,
and then pass away. Political organizations are dissolved by influence
of time. At some periods and in some portions of the world, barbarous
races appropriate to their use the former domain of civilization, while
at other points of time and space nations are rapidly advancing in
wealth and refinement. If savage communities have been exterminated by
superior races of men, so have the arts and civilities of the most
enlightened people been displaced by the rude passions and rugged
manners of barbarism. As in the natural world there is a slow
revolution of thousands of years, by which every part of this globe is
brought within the tropics and beneath th