U4 



Catta is :i Latin synonyme hvfelis, and Gov. Enclicolt, 

 who was enough of a Unguis • to peak French, was not 

 averse to interjecting a fo eign phrase now and then in 

 his manuscript records, a practice quite in accord with the 

 fashion of his times. INIoreover, the word Catta has 

 been used, the lexicographeis tell us, as the name of a 

 sea-craft, at least since A. D., 1071, and probably much 

 longer. How much the axa-orr of Herodotus and Pindar, 

 — the 'a-/.d-co> of Xenophon and Thucydides, in which 

 Plutarch saj's Csesar made his escape from Alexandria 

 and the wiles of Cleopatra — had to do with the origin of 

 this word for ^' boat," we must leave to conjecture. 



A century later, this spot inspire! an interest somewhat 

 graver than questions of phi ology excite. 1773-4 was a 

 year of tumult. It was the 3'ear of the Boston Tea Party 

 and the Boston Port Bill. The people of this province 

 had lost confidence in the good faith of the only govern- 

 ment they had, and were not yet al)le to see their way to 

 the establishment of another. Lawless violence stalked 

 abroad, and societ}^ seemed, for the time, to be thrown 

 back upon its elemental forces. Week by week the feel- 

 inir about the im]:)ortati()n of tea 2:rew intenscr and 

 more threatening. The daily journals teemed with pro- 

 test and denunciation. Hutchinson's secret letters had 

 been sent home by Franklin and read in the assembly. 

 Accounts of burnings in effigy, and coats of tar and 

 feathers, were as frequent as are runawiiys and coasting 

 accidents to-da}'. In the midst of all this, as if to make 

 confu-ion worse confounded, the scourge of small-pox, 

 absent for man}' years, reappeared in Massachusetts Bay. 

 The terror which the loathsome disease inspired, and the 

 relief experienced from the ne^v mode of treatment by in- 

 oculation, are well indicated in the narrative of an inci- 

 dent in the history of Cat Island, which we transcribe 



