Uncas himself; but the Guilford farmers promptly quieted every adverse title with a generous supply of coats, kettles, and hoes. The last aboriginal claimant of the old township was bought off so late as 1686.1

Even while Shaumpishuh was amusing herself with her new mirror, we may imagine the planters busily planning the "Old Stone House" and, possibly, other structures which were to shelter them through the coming winter, while Shaumpishuh's copper-colored subjects trundled stones. for their new neighbors from a ledge eighty rods away, across the swamp. As Abraham Bradley, 3d, one of Guilford's poetic sons, sings in strains that the New England Muse of the seventeenth century might easily have owned:

"Pleased with the sight, they now enjoyed the purchase,

Cleared up the ground, built fences, houses, churches.

Soon did the savage howl and yelling cease,
Succeeded by religion, love, and peace.
And 'tis among their heirs and their assigns,
Now happiness resides and virtue shines."

The Old Stone House, which was built for Mr. Whitfield not only as a dwelling

1 Smith, pp. 65-76.

the house was renovated, the embrasure in the second story which was eloquent of anticipated assaults, and the secret recesses in the attic which were equally eloquent of anticipated dangers from the higher powers, reminded the visitor of the perils of his forefathers. Mr. Whitfield abode in the house until his return to England in 1651,

and perhaps the children whom he left behind him still inhabited the home. Afterwards it passed into the hands of a

W. H. H. Murray.

Major Thompson of London, and then from one family to another until it became the property of Mrs. H. W. Chittenden, whose daughter, Mrs. Cone, now owns it

Guilford Institute.

and makes it the homestead of her model farm. In this capacity Whitfield's old manse bids fair to survive for another quarter-millenium.1

The Guilford fathers followed the example of New Haven in laying out their village around a market-place or green, although perhaps they thought rather of village-greens or market-places at Oakley and other Surrey towns than of the square at Quinnipiac. There it was, at any rate, a bare, rough oblong, with a swamp along its eastern side, and its own surface much diversified with knolls and intervening ponds. There, too, stood the meetinghouse of stone, in the midst of the acre reserved for the long, last sleep.

Imagine, then, in 1640, Mr. Whitfield and his ten children sharing the comparatively palatial comforts of the Stone House. Perhaps the pressure for room was relieved a bit when young John Higginson came to town, married one of the ten, and settled in another stone house at the southwest corner of the Green. Mr. Higginson, although only twenty-four years old, had already served for four years as chaplain

1 Appropriately enough, the Old Stone House, the first home of Puritanism in Guilford, sheltered in 1854, the first Roman Catholic service in Guilford. Let us hope that Whitfield did not turn over in his grave!

at the Saybrook Colony, and now came to Guilford to officiate as teacher in Mr. Whitfield's church. In the striking phrase of the elegy afterwards written in honor of John Higginson's ninety-two years of godly life and labor, by " His unworthy colleague, Nicholas Noyes,"

"Young to the Pulpit he did get,

And seventy-two years in't did sweat." 1 Stone houses were common in Guilford. Mr. Jasper Stilwell occupied a third. and another was the home of Samuel Desborough, magistrate, who returned to England in 1651 to become a member of Cromwell's parliaments and Keeper of the Great Seal for the Kingdom of Scotland. Across the Green from Parson Higginson's lay the home-lots of Bishop and

1 New Eng. Hist. and Genealogical Register, Vol. VII. pp. 237-40.

The Halleck Monument.

of Ward, the latter the very name which has been carried to immortality as a preface to Beecher.

Beyond the "meeting house," the townplot threw out two long antennæ, feeling their way northward among the hills. Where the westerly one, known by the inglorious title, "Petticoat Lane," proceeded from the northwest corner of the Green, lived a group of worshipful masters. There was Mr. Robert Kitchel, who, in 1666, rather than stay to endure the unsanctified sway of Connecticut, chose to "go west" with Parson Pierson of Branford, and helped to found Newark, N.J. There was William Leete also, a man of means and education, sometime clerk of the Bishop's court in Cambridgeshire, a good writer and master of his mother-tongue.

Opposite to Mr. Leete lived William Chittenden, ancestor of Thomas Chittenden, the famous Vermont governor, and of the late Simeon Baldwin Chittenden, of Guilford and Brooklyn, financier and philanthropist, in whose name the old homestead still remains.

If William Chittenden could revisit the glimpses of the moon, in this year 1889, how pleased the sturdy Puritan would be to decipher the date " 1639 " upon a pillar,

Wright, who was a thorn in the flesh of the whole community. He was perpetually dissatisfied with the shortcomings of his neighbors, and sadly grieved and offended William Dudley and Thomas Cook in 1646 by accusing them of having "large" consciences. Wright must have smiled triumphantly when, twelve years later, William Dudley, Jr., was publicly censured by the court and fined fifteen shillings for "Deceitful workeing up of shooes..... weh apeared both shorter than other shooes of yt size, and to be made up wth many shreds of leather instead of a midle sole, weh being an unusuall maner much wrong to ye wearer of the

erected at the very corner of his own home lot by his descendant, in commemoration of the ancestral labor! and then how scandalized he would be, on going a few steps further, to find, almost on the spot where he sheltered himself from the pomps and vanities of the world, a life-size statue of Apollo, erected by the same scion of his house!

Going up the easterly horn of the Green, called by the much less attractive name of "Crooked Lane," past the spot where in later times a "Sabbada house" testified to the moral relaxation of a second generation, the habitations of Halls, Nortons, Dowds, and Linsleys met the eye; and the return trip down Petticoat Lane carried the visitor past the abode of another influential burgher, William Dudley, whose baby boy had been born on shipboard. neighbor of Mr. Dudley was one Benjamin

A

Daniel Hand.

Shooes as was judged by 3 Shoomakers in court."1

The "magestraticall power" was administered upon a despotic theory for the first four years. The major part of the company would not be bothered with the grave responsibilities of state-making until farms were laid out, houses built, and cellars filled. The six men who had purchased the land of the natives held the title-deeds until a church should be formed to take the fee-simple of Guilford; and out of these six proprietors four men were promptly selected, Robert Kitchel, William Chittenden, John Bishop, and William Leete,- having "Full power and authority to act, order, and dispatch all matters respecting

other settlement, no public records, and no corps of elected officers but the committee of four autocrats.

Why did Whitfield and his hearers live for four years without "a church gathered and constituted according to God's owne mind in all things"? It may be that they kept hoping for large accessions from England, until the success of the Puritans in the Civil War dispelled such hopes. It is not unlikely that there was some oppo

the public weale and civil government of the plantation until a church is gathered among us." The commission was renewed in 1642, and not revoked until the church was built upon its seven pillars, June 29, 1643

Therefore until consummation, towards which the whole Guilford creation moved, was finally attained, there were in the town no organized church, no body of freemen, no political affiliations with any 1 This Dudley was, I suppose, the youth whose cradle Neptune had rocked. He found it convenient presently to remove to Saybrook. At about the same time, however, one of the magistrates paid off the old score by seizing a convenient occasion to remark that " Benj'. Wright's conscience was a corrupt and rotten conscience, not having a word to guide it."

sition in town to the adoption of New Haven's theocratic system; but increasing poverty and the danger from the Dutch forced both Guilford and New Haven, in 1643, to unite speedily and to enter the newly formed Confederation of New England colonies. On that busy June day, when the Guilford people erected church and state after Davenport's model, received the resignations of the four rulers, and transferred the title-deeds of the town to the church, that is, to the body of freemen, there was careful reservation of the right of non-freemen to be heard in town-meeting. "No laws or orders" were" to be made except before all the planters [whether freemen or not]." Another sign of democratic feeling was the town law that no