f Newburyport,
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, Rev. Sidney
Edwards Morse, and others scarcely less notable.

Robert Morse, Anthony's brother, left England at about the time of the
beginning of the civil war, and located in Boston as a tailor. He was a
sterling old Puritan, prudent, enterprising and of strict morality. He
speculated in real estate, and after a while removed to Elizabethtown,
New Jersey, which place he helped to settle, and where he amassed much
wealth. He had nine children. Among his descendants were some men of
eminence, as Dr. Isaac Morse of Elizabethtown, Honorable Nathan Morse of
New Orleans, Isaac E. Morse, long a member of Congress from Louisiana,
Judge Morse of Ohio, and others.

None of these sons of Samuel, the mate of Cromwell, were great men
themselves, but were notable in their descendants. Samuel's descendant
came to represent a historical family; Anthony's greatest descendant
invented the telegraph; and the descendants of Robert were noble
Southrons. William alone of the five brothers had notoriety. Samuel,
Jr., was more eminent, but William made a mark in Massachusetts'
history. Settling in the town of Newbury, William Morse led an humble
and monotonous life. When he had lived there more than forty years, and
had come to be an old and infirm man, he was made to figure unhappily
in the first legal investigation of New England witchcraft. This was
in 1679-81, or more than ten years before the Salem witchcraft, and
it constitutes a page of hitherto unpublished Massachusetts history.
Mr. and Mrs. Morse resided in a plain, wooden house that still stands
at the head of Market Street, in what is now Newburyport. William had
been a farmer, but his sons had now taken the homestead, and he was
supporting himself and wife by shoe-making. His age was almost
three-score-years-and-ten, and he was a reputably worthy man, then just
in the early years of his dotage. His wife, the "goody Elizabeth," was
a Newbury woman, and apparently some few years her husband's senior.

I can easily imagine the worthy couple there in the old square room of
a winter's night. On one side of the fire-place sits the old man in
his hard arm-chair, his hands folded, and his spectacles awry, as he
sonorously snores away the time. Opposite him sits the old lady, a
little, toothless dame, with angular features half hidden in a stiffly
starched white cap, her fingers flying over her knitting-work, as
p