native polish which courtly experiences might or might not have given
him, and with a simple, high-toned, upright, and neighborly spirit,
which made him an apt and a faithful administrator of a great variety of
trusts. His old Bible, now in the possession of Mr. George Livermore of
Cambridge, represented the divine presence and law in his household,
for all its members, parents and children, masters and servants. He
entertained hospitably his full share of "the godly preachers," who were
the wandering luminaries, and, in some respects, the angelic visitants
of those days. He was evidently a very patient listener to sermons,
though we have not the proof in any surviving notebooks of his that one
of his excellent son John's furnishes us, that he took pains to
transcribe the heads, the savory passages, and the textual attestations
of the elaborate, but utterly juiceless sermons of the time. The entries
in his almanacs afford a curious variety, in which interesting events of
public importance alternate with homely details touching the affairs of
his neighborhood and the incidents in the domestic life of his relatives
and acquaintance. One matter, as we shall soon see, on which a fact in
the life, of Governor Winthrop depends, finds an unexpected disclosure
from Adam's pen. Here are a few excerpts from these entries:--"1597. The
VIth of July I received a privie seale to lend the Q. matie [Elizabeth]
LXX. for a yere."--"1602. Sept. the 27th day in ye mornying the Bell
did goe for mother [a conventional epithet] Tiffeyn, but she recouered."
This decides a matter which has sometimes been disputed,--that, while
with us, in our old times, "the passing bell" indicated the progress of
a funeral train, anciently in England it signified that a soul was
believed to be passing from a body supposed to be _in extremis_. And a
doleful sound it must have been to those of whom it made a false report,
as of "mother Tiffeyn."--"_Decem._ ye XXI day my brother Alibaster came
to my house & toulde me yt he made certayne inglishe verses in his
sleepe, wh. he recited unto me, & I lent him XLs."--"1603 April ye
28th day was the funeralles kept at Westminster for our late Queene
Elizabethe."--"1603. On Munday ye seconde of Maye, one Keitley, a
blackesmythe, dwellinge in Lynton in Cambridgeshire, had a poore man to
his father whom he kepte. A gentleman of ye same Towne sent a horse to
shoe, the father held up the horses legge whilest his soonne did shoe