horse or ox or beast of burden had carried its load.

But up from the sea the ground rose gradually for a mile, and along this
slope that faced the tide, wind and storm had partly cleared the ground,
and on the hillsides our forefathers made their homes. The houses were
built facing either the east or the south. This persistence to face
either the sun or the sea shows a last, strange rudiment of paganism,
making queer angles now that surveyors have come with Gunter's chain and
transit, laying out streets and doing their work.

A mile out, north of Braintree, on the Boston road, came, in Sixteen
Hundred Twenty-five, one Captain Wollaston, a merry wight, and thirty boon
companions, all of whom probably left England for England's good. They
were in search of gold and pelf, and all were agreed on one point: they
were quite too good to do any hard work. Their camp was called Mount
Wollaston, or the Merry Mount. Our gallant gentlemen cultivated the
friendship of the Indians, in the hope that they would reveal the caves
and caverns where the gold grew lush and nuggets cumbered the way; and the
Indians, liking the drink they offered, brought them meal and corn and
furs.

And so the thirty set up a Maypole, adorned with bucks' horns, and drank
and feasted, and danced like fairies or furies, the livelong day or night.
So scandalously did these exiled lords behave that good folks made a wide
circuit 'round to avoid their camp.

Preaching had been in vain, and prayers for the conversion of the wretches
remained unanswered. So the neighbors held a convention, and decided to
send Captain Miles Standish with a posse to teach the merry men manners.

Standish appeared among the bacchanalians one morning, perfectly sober,
and they were not. He arrested the captain, and bade the others begone.
The leader was shipped back to England, with compliments and regrets, and
the thirty scattered. This was the first move in that quarter in favor of
local option.

Six years later, the land thereabouts was granted and apportioned out to
the Reverend John Wilson, William Coddington, Edward Quinsey, James
Penniman, Moses Payne and Francis Eliot.

And these men and their families built houses and founded "the North
Precinct of the Town of Braintree."

Between the North Precinct and the South Precinct there was continual
rivalry. Boys who were caught over the dead-line, which was marked by
Deacon Penniman's house, had to fight. Thus things contin