their successors inherit.

[Illustration: 124 TREMONT STREET.]

At no time in its history, from 1832 to the present time, has the firm
been without a Ticknor in its copartnership. For a brief season,
however, the name disappeared from the firm's imprint.

The great publishing house has just inaugurated a new tenure of life as
Ticknor & Co., the copartnership consisting of Benjamin H. and Thomas B.
Ticknor, sons of William D. Ticknor, and George F. Godfrey, of Bangor,
Me., a gentleman of marked culture and geniality, and one, too, who, all
may rest assured, will take kindly to and will find success in the book
business. With scholarly acquirements, and with minds trained to the
wants of to-day, the sons of W.D. Ticknor, both gentlemen of refined
literary taste, now step to the front with strong hands and vigorous
purposes, not alone to perpetuate but to add to the former reputation of
the time-honored publishing house.

The new house succeeds to a rich inheritance of the books of younger
American authors,--those of Howells, James, Edgar Fawcett, Kate Field,
Mrs. Burnett, Miss Howard, Julian Hawthorne, George W. Cable, and
others. That it means to maintain the supremacy is foreshadowed by the
list of important works which it has announced as forthcoming.

* * * * *

THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND WITCH.

By Willard H. Morse, M.D.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, in an English country
district, two lads romped on the same lea and chased the same
butterflies. One was a little brown-eyed boy, with red cheeks, fine
round form, and fiery temper. The other was a gentle child, tall, lithe,
and blonde. The one was the son of a man of wealth and a noble lady, and
carried his captive butterflies to a mansion-house, and kept them in a
crystal case. The other ran from the fields to a farm-house, and thought
of the lea as a grain field. It might have been the year 1606, when the
two were called in from their play-ground, and sent to school, thus to
begin life. The farmer's boy went to a common school, and his brown-eyed
play-mate entered a grammar school. From that time their paths were far
apart.

The name of the tall, blonde boy was Samuel Morse. At fifteen he left
school to help his father on the home farm. At twenty he had become
second tenant on a Wiltshire holding, and began to be a prosperous
farmer. Before he had attained the age of forty he was the father of a
large fa