6 3 6 
president’s address. 
summer, and neither his victuals nor two doctors could do 
him any good ! “ Fresher,” I may say, is the local name for 
a young Frog ; Tadpoles we call “ Spotspoons.” 
The attachment of the inhabitants of low lying districts 
especially, to the land of their birth, was long ago proverbial, 
The people of Ruston still uphold this reputation. Present 
day family names may be traced back for many generations 
in the parish registers, but there are no longer any descendants 
of Porson, who was church clerk here for over forty years, 
and whose gifted son (after being sent to Eton by his patron, 
Mr. Norris of Witton) rose to the high position of Professor 
of Greek at the University of Cambridge in 1803. 
I do not remember a case of ague, but I buried an old 
Ruston woman last month whose countenance bore the 
specific yellow tinge of that once prevalent complaint ; escape 
from which caused the late Col. Hawker, of punt gun fame, 
to render thanks to God on safely leaving what he called, 
in 1815, our pestilential climate. 
The oldest Ruston parishioner seems to have been Widow 
Helsdon, who died in 1803, aged 105 years and 11 months, 
after having lived in three centuries. She left a numerous 
progeny of nearly eighty persons, including several great-great- 
grandchildren. Elizabeth Bates died here in her 99th year 
in 1894. The present church cleTk, E. Gaze, has been in 
office all but fifty years. 
The longevity of the poorer people, and their ability to 
wreak a bare subsistence from the many commons in the 
Smallburgh Union, supplemented by “ taking of the parish,” 
may partly account for the money now spent here in out- 
door relief being nearly the highest of any district in 
England. 
As a member of the Board of Guardians, I may, however, 
thankfully say that our policy has not been to destroy the 
liberty of the needy by forcing them into the House. 
Large families are the general rule, and there has been 
