ongregations of old put in mind what farewell
they took of the land of Egypt.

So our own earliest records tell us that it was on the morning of
Saturday, of what is now the nineteenth of December, that the little
exploring party from the _Mayflower_, then lying at her anchor in
Provincetown Harbor, after a day and night of much trouble and danger,
sorely buffeted by wind and wave in rough New England's December seas,
found themselves on an island in Plymouth Bay. It was a mild, "faire
sunshining day. And this being the last day of the weeke, they prepared
ther to keepe the Sabath. On Munday they sounded the harbor, and marched
into the land, and found a place fitt for situation. So they returned to
their shipp againe [at Provincetown] with this news. On the twenty-fifth
of December they weyed anchor to goe to the place they had discovered,
and came within two leagues of it, but were faine to bear up againe; but
the twenty-sixth day, the winde came faire, and they arrived safe in
this harbor. And after wards tooke better view of the place, and
resolved wher to pitch their dwelling; and the fourth day [of January]
begane to erecte the first house for commone use to receive them and
their goods." Such, in the quaint language of Bradford, is the calendar
of New England's Passover; and, beginning on the nineteenth of December,
it ends on the fourth of January, covering as nearly as may be the
Christmas holyday period.

Is there any better use to which the Passover anniversary can be put
than to retrospection? "And when your children shall say unto you, What
mean you by this service? ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the
Lord's passover, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses."
So the old story is told again, being thus kept ever green in memory;
and, in telling it, the experiences of the past are brought insensibly
to bear on the conditions of the present. Thus, once a year, like the
Israelites of old, we, as a people, may take our bearings and verify our
course, as we plunge on out of the infinite past into the unknowable
future. It is a useful practice; and we are here this first evening of
our Passover period to observe it.

This, too, is an Historical Society,--that of Lexington, "a name," as,
when arraigned before the tribunal of the French Terror, Danton said of
his own, "tolerably known in the Revolution;" and I am invited to
address you because I am President of the Massachusetts Historical
Soci