daughters of the West India nabob were courted by George Erving and Sir William Pepperell, it is hardly probable that the mysteries and tricks of archi

tecture were unriddled to their comprehension. It was just the place for a tender declaration. Its picturesque romance would have been chilled beyond re

covery had the ardent lover learned that it was an artful combination of beauty and utility-in short, an ice-house.

Isaac Royall the first was succeeded by Isaac Royall the second, who lived in as much state as his sire. His sister married Colonel Vassal, who dwelt in the old mansion at Cambridge, now the home of Henry W. Longfellow, the poet. Royall was an intimate of governors and grandees, and one day he drove in his coach to Boston, and, while sipping his Madeira with some of the choice spirits of the town, the news of the battle of Lexington was received. He was afraid to return home. He never saw his handsome old house again. He was shut up in Boston for long and weary months, and, when the British army went to Halifax, he was one of the unhappy refugees who was obliged to go also. He went to England finally, where he died, endeavoring to the last to prevent the forfeiture of his estate. He was a large-hearted, benevolent man, as his many bequests prove. The Royall Professorship of Law at Harvard was founded through his bounty.

This old mansion, with its appointments and its slaves, attracted General Charles Lee, that prince of egotists, who aimed to supplant Washington—the man "full of strange oaths," with a huge nose, satirical mouth, and restless eyes, who sat upon his horse like a fox-hunter, and was so slovenly in his habits that nobody grieved at his absence; with a pack of yelping curs at his heels, he took possession, and ordered the wondering negroes about with lordly airs. It was he who first called it "Hobgoblin Hall." Washington, not pleased that Lee should take up his quarters a mile and a half from the left wing of the army, ordered him to return to duty. General Sullivan was shortly allured by the same grand old house, but was scarcely settled when his aide-de-camp handed him a letter from the commander-in-chief, which caused him to change his quarters with celerity.

The ancient Quincy mansion is less curiously antique than those we have sketched, but is a characteristic specimen of colonial architecture in New England. It was built in 1770 by Colonel Josiah Quincy, on ground purchased of the local Indian sachem as early as 1635, by Edmund Quincy, of England. The estate has ever since remained in the family. In four successive genera tions a son has borne the name of Josiah, two of whom were Mayors of Boston,

one the President of Harvard College, and all of them more or less distinguished in political life. The house was placed upon a beautiful knoll, at the extremity of the noblest private estate in Massachusetts. Five hundred broad acres of meadow and woodland surrounding it give the idea of an English park come

down by entail since the Conquest. A wide, leafy avenue leads from the high

road to the mansion, from which are charming glimpses of the sea, of Boston Harbor and its islands, and of the countless white sails continually winging their way into port.

Colonel Josiah Quincy, the designer and builder of this house, occupied it during Washington's investment of Boston. He rode often to camp, with projects for driving the British ships to sea, or sinking them in the bottom of the harbor. When the fleet was at last under full sail, flying hence, he scratched the date with a diamond on the window-pane. Samuel A. Drake, in describing a visit to the Quincy mansion in 1875, says: "When I was fairly within the house, which is furnished as houses were furnished a century ago—where antique-dressed portraits looked down from the walls, and where sedan-chairs in cool corridors invited to post-prandial naps-I felt that modern life had little right to intrude itself into such a place. Every visitor, I would suggest, should be required to don a powdered periwig, laced coat, and silk stockings, in order that the prevailing idea may not be disturbed. The fragrance of the old life and manners still lingered about those wainscoted apartments, and a halfhour's visit converted the imaginary into the real. How quaint are those entries in John Adams's diary: 'Drank tea at Grandfather Quincy's,' or, 'Spent the evening at Colonel Quincy's with Colonel Lincoln'! The men talked politics, and the ladies talked about the fashions by the last London packet. Both the Adamses, father and son, frequented this house. Here Hull, after destroying the Guerrière, and here Decatur, were entertained.”

Scientists are sometimes fond of deducing a connection between the character of a people and the structure of that portion of the earth's crust which they inhabit. England has been called a lump of chalk; New England might appropriately be styled a block of granite, since it seems to be such, thinly covered with soil, through which the harder substance is continually cropping out. Quincy, for instance, which owes its name to its old distinguished family, is almost a solid mass of granite, hard, inflexible, and insusceptible to polish; but strong, valuable, and enduring. The same adjectives might with grace be applied to its human products. No other town in America can boast of being the birthplace of two Presidents of the United States. No roadside walls and building foundations of conglomerate in the land are more typical of the unæsthetic but well-balanced Puritan character than those found in Quincy. No succession of illustrious men have been better known and appreciated, and more honored and glorified by a grateful people, than the Quincys and Adamses of this famous nook of creation. It was here, also, that the first railway (of

any note) in America was put in operation. This was in 1826. The rails were wooden, plated with iron, and laid on blocks of stone, the gauge being six feet. It was projected to remove the granite for the Bunker Hill Monument. The carriages weighed about six tons, and, when loaded with twenty tons of stone, were easily drawn over the tramway by one horse.

The Adams mansion, intimately interwoven with the public and private lives of the two Presidents, and now occupied as the summer home of Hon. Charles Francis Adams, built long before the Revolution, will be found upon a future page. Two humble cottages, at the foot of Penn's Hill, are pointed out as the birthplaces of the father and son who figured so conspicuously before the world. From the eminence beyond these, John Quincy Adams and his accomplished mother watched the smoke arising from burning Charlestown on the day of the battle of Bunker Hill.

The settlement of the western part of Massachusetts was much later than that of the eastern. The stony hills of Hampshire County reposed in solitude until a short time before the war. The pioneers of a large tract in the highland region, between the Connecticut and Housatonic, were Jacob Nash, a lineal descendant of Thomas Nash, the English poet and pamphleteer, and Rev. Moses Hallock. The former had obtained a grant from the Government, the latter was an energetic theological graduate. A town was laid out, which was named Cummington; but after a few years the portion where the Nashes and Hallocks had settled was converted into a new town, and called Plainfield. The houses built upon these hills were of the most substantial character, and the tallest and trimmest of the trees of the forest were placed in rows before them, like sentinels on duty. A quaint meeting-house lifted its belfry into the sky, and a handsome curtained pulpit, under an enormous sounding-board, was occupied over half a century by the excellent divine who had been its associate founder and builder. Ebenezer Snell, a stern old Puritan magistrate, built the house of the sketch, upon a hill some two miles from the homes of Hallock and Nash, and in sight of the meeting-house; but the dividing line of the two towns ran between, and he lived in Cummington. Dr. Peter Bryant, the first physician in that region, a man of rare scholastic attainments, married the daughter of Squire Snell, as he was popularly called, and through her the