FOR PROMOTING AGRICULTURE 123 



of the day. President Lowell, having in his remarks 

 led up to an enumeration of the various gifts which 

 had thus been received by the society, said, with 

 special reference to the latest gift of the sheep : 



General Coffin, not content with purchasing them, 

 has, at an age above three score years and ten, fol- 

 lowed them through their long passage to New Bruns- 

 wick, and thence, without delay, from Eastport to 

 Boston, in order that they might grace the show of the 

 society on this anniversary. He is now present at our 

 festival. There is no feeling stronger than that of an 

 attachment to the country in which we are born. Time 

 and distance have no effect, unless it be in making the 

 feeling more intense. I know of no case more touch- 

 ing, none in which the strength of that natural feeling 

 has been more strongly exemplified than in that of 

 these two brothers, who, separated from their country 

 in youth, engaged in the service of a nation now 

 foreign to us, look back with a kind, affectionate and 

 devoted attachment to the land of their birth. This 

 family, as is probably well known to you all, were 

 among the earliest settlers of Nantucket, an island 

 which has done more than any other spot to raise the 

 reputation of our nation for hardy enterprise and un- 

 blemished morals. Shall I receive a single dissentient 

 vote, when I propose the thanks of this assembled 

 body of full-blooded Yankees to General Coffin and 

 his brother. Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin? * 



* The brothers, John and Isaac Coffin, were sons of Nathaniel Coffin, 

 who, towards the middle of the last century, was a merchant in Boston, 

 and for a time, was the king's cashier of customs. His residence was at 

 the westerly corner of Essex street and Rainsford's lane. The lane, 

 much widened, is now known as Harrison avenue. The houselot and 

 garden extended southerly to the shore, the line of which is denoted by 

 the present Beach street, and the waters of South Cove washed against 

 the garden wall of the estate. The mansion house, which stood near 

 Essex street, was the birth place of John and Isaac; and it may be 

 surmised that their fondness, or, certainly, fearlessness of the sea, 

 traceable in part to a Nantucket ancestry, gained something from this 

 proximity of the tide water to the garden wall. It may be suspected 



