lishes half a dozen preachers in a small community is a
very modern innovation.

John Hancock, "Bishop of Lexington," was a man of pronounced personality,
as is plainly seen in his portrait in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They
say he ruled the town with a rod of iron; and when the young men, who
adorned the front steps of the meetinghouse during service, grew
disorderly, he stopped in his prayer, and going outside soundly cuffed the
ears of the first delinquent he could lay hands upon. In his clay there
was a dash of facetiousness that saved him from excess, supplying a useful
check to his zeal--for zeal uncurbed is very bad. He was a wise and
beneficent dictator; and government under such a one can not be improved
upon. His manner was gracious, frank and open, and such was the specific
gravity of his nature that his words carried weight, and his wish was
sufficient.

The house where this fine old autocrat lived and reigned is standing in
Lexington now. When you walk out through Cambridge and Arlington on your
way to Concord, following the road the British took on their way out to
Concord, you will pass by it. It is a good place to stop and rest. You
will know the place by the tablet in front, on which is the legend: "Here
John Hancock and Samuel Adams were sleeping on the night of the
Eighteenth of April, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-five, when aroused by Paul
Revere."

The Reverend Jonas Clark owned the house after the Reverend John Hancock,
and the ministries of those two men, and their occupancy of the house,
cover one hundred years and five years more. Here the thirteen children of
Jonas Clark were born, and all lived to be old men and women. When you
call there I hope you will be treated with the same gentle courtesy that I
met. If you delay not your visit too long, you will see a fine, motherly
woman, with white "sausage curls" and a high back-comb, wearing a check
dress and felt slippers, and she will tell you that she is over eighty,
and that when her mother was a little girl she once sat on Governor
Hancock's knee and he showed her the works in his watch.

And then as you go away you will think again of what the old lady has just
told you, and as you look back for a parting glance at the house, standing
firm and solemn in its rusty-gray dignity, you will doff your hat to it,
and mayhap murmur: The days of man on earth--they are but as a passing
shadow!

"Here John Hancock and Samuel Adams were sleeping wh