276 History of Hingham. 



sires desirous of finding some record of their ancestors, or seek- 

 ing for a glimpse or perhaps a tracing of an autograph of family 

 or national celebrity. Well may this quiet apartment be the 

 mecca for hundreds and thousands of those to whom the story of 

 their country's settlement and early days comes like a fresh 

 breeze of earnestness and purpose, of faith and devotion and 

 bravery. Here such come from the East and the far West alike, 

 and feel as one must, whether at Lexington or Bunker Hill or 

 Plymouth, as though on sacred ground. For here the whole 

 atmosphere seems to breathe of the past ; the Archives of the 

 Colony, the Province, and the Commonwealth ; quaint and loved 

 names of the Puritans and the Pilgrims, and quainter records of 

 their doings and trials and expeditions ; votes of the deputies, 

 orders of the magistrates, proclamations of the Royal Governors, 

 queer old yellow and stained papers written in characters so pecu- 

 liar as to require a special knowledge to decipher them ; copies or 

 originals of the famous Hutchinson papers ; correspondence with 

 the French authorities in Canada or the Pilgrim governor in 

 Plymouth ; a treaty with some famous Indian sachem ; an account 

 of a pirate ship, or an order for the hanging of its lawless chief ; 

 a report of Captain Church, or a rumor of Myles Standish ; laws 

 for the regulation of religion, the promotion of education, the 

 encouragement of commerce ; letters of Winthrop, of Dudley, of 

 Harry Vane ; appointments to the command and grants of men 

 and money for the attempts against Nova Scotia and Louisburg 

 and Canada ; victories and feastings and fastings ; the story of 

 Acadia and the wanderers, crudely and disjointedly told in various 

 papers ; more letters and signatures, but now of Washington 

 and Franklin, of Knox 'and Hancock and Adams and Lincoln and 

 Warren ; committees of safety and their doings ; conflicts with Brit- 

 ish sailors and officials and soldiers ; preparations for the Revolu- 

 tion and commissions for its officers, — all these and many more are 

 to be found here, with papers whose contents are hardly yet known, 

 and affording doubtless rich stores of original research and infor- 

 mation for the historian. Here too are great, unwieldy volumes 

 filled with the muster rolls of the officers and men who served 

 their king against the French in the North, the Spaniard in the 

 Main, the Indian in the forest ; who fought too, when the time 

 came, the king and his redcoats from Boston to Yorktown, and 

 his Hessian allies at Stillwater and Trenton and Princeton. We 

 may read — sometimes in a hand, and oftentimes in a spelling, 

 that almost silences criticism — the signatures of our grandfathers 

 or great-grandfathers to receipts of money or supplies ; and we may 

 proudly follow the record of their devoted services through year 

 after year of warfare and privation in their struggle for freedom 

 and nationality. Among the bound papers we should find a sur- 

 prising number, filling indeed three large books, numbered 11, 12, 

 13, known as the " Lexington Alarm Rolls." These contain 



