HIS CHILDHOOD AND EARLY HOME. 5 



who lies buried in Little Compton, Rhode Island; 

 and her mother was the daughter of John Alden and 

 Priscilla Mullins, the legend of whose love, which 

 brought disappointment to the hopes of Captain 

 Miles Standish, has been commemorated in Mr. 

 Longfellow's verse. Mr. Silliman well remembered 

 his grandmother, who died in her eightieth year in 

 his father's house ; and she was fourteen years old 

 when her grandmother died. On her who caressed 

 him in his childhood had rested the hands of one 

 who was nurtured by emigrants in the Mayflower. 

 The grandfather of Mr. Siliirnan, in the maternal 

 line, was Rev. Joseph Fish, a graduate of Harvard 

 College, and for fifty years the pastor of a church in 

 North Stonington, Connecticut, whose reputation as 

 a man of exemplary piety is sustained by his letters, 

 many of which have been preserved. His ministry 

 was disturbed by the divisions excited in his parish 

 by the Separatists, whose subversive movements fol- 

 lowed the great religious revival of 1740, and against 

 whom his principal publication, a collection of Ser- 

 mons, was directed. His eldest daughter, Mary Fish, 

 the mother of Mr. Silliman, was first married, in 

 1758, to the Rev. John Noyes, son of the pastor of 

 the First Church in New Haven. Mr. Noyes died 

 in 1767. Her marriage with General Silliman took 

 place in 1775. He had been previously married, and 

 a son, William Silliman, the fruit of this earlier mar- 

 riage, was now a youth. Three of her children also 

 survived, Joseph, John, and James Noyes, the last 

 two of whom ultimately became faithful ministers 

 of the Gospel, and died at an advanced age. In 

 1804 she was married the third time, to Dr. John 



