s grandson. Its genial and learned historian, Joshua Coffin, was
my first school-teacher, and all my life I have lived in sight of its
green hills and in hearing of its Sabbath bells. Its wealth of natural
beauty has not been left unsung by its own poets, Hannah Gould, Mrs.
Hopkins, George Lunt, and Edward A. Washburn, while Harriet Prescott
Spofford's Plum Island Sound is as sweet and musical as Tennyson's Brook.
Its history and legends are familiar to me. I seem to have known all its
old worthies, whose descendants have helped to people a continent, and
who have carried the name and memories of their birthplace to the Mexican
gulf and across the Rocky Mountains to the shores of the Pacific. They
were the best and selectest of Puritanism, brave, honest, God-fearing men
and women; and if their creed in the lapse of time has lost something of
its vigor, the influence of their ethical righteousness still endures.
The prophecy of Samuel Sewall that Christians should be found in Newbury
so long as pigeons shall roost on its oaks and Indian corn grows in
Oldtown fields remains still true, and we trust will always remain so.
Yet, as of old, the evil personage sometimes intrudes himself into
company too good for him. It was said in the witchcraft trials of 1692
that Satan baptized his converts at Newbury Falls, the scene, probably,
of one of Hawthorne's weird _Twice Told Tales_; and there is a tradition
that, in the midst of a heated controversy between one of Newbury's
painful ministers and his deacon, who (anticipating Garrison by a
century) ventured to doubt the propriety of clerical slaveholding, the
Adversary made his appearance in the shape of a black giant stalking
through Byfield. It was never, I believe, definitely settled whether he
was drawn there by the minister's zeal in defence of slavery or the
deacon's irreverent denial of the minister's right and duty to curse
Canaan in the person of his negro.

Old Newbury has sometimes been spoken of as ultra-conservative and
hostile to new ideas and progress, but this is not warranted by its
history. More than two centuries ago, when Major Pike, just across the
river, stood up and denounced in open town meeting the law against
freedom of conscience and worship, and was in consequence fined and
outlawed, some of Newbury's best citizens stood bravely by him. The town
took no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women and
town charges hanged for witche