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thoughts with due regard to the demands of the omnipotent public. Without, a street organ passed beneath his window. The tune that it was grinding out discordantly stirred a forgotten chord of feeling in his breast. Again he sat on the high school platform on commencement day, and the orchestra played the Beautiful Blue Danube. The next number on the program was his oration on "Allegiance to Ideals." He remembered it now with a mingled feeling of amusement and shame,-it was so unworldly wise, but it was so noble in its outlived aspirations. A sense of unworthiness oppressed him as he thought of it after many years of oblivion. Then he had dreamed of greatness, of art for art's sake, of the uplifting of humanity. He had meant to write masterpieces of fiction that should live and ennoble the race; he had meant to be a leader of the thoughts of men. And mingled with the golden vision of his career was the glamour of a youth's dream of love, the thought of the sympathy and help of some perfect woman to cheer him on his upward way.

In the years that had fallen from him he had outlived his dreams. He had found the public not clay to be moulded in his hands; instead, it was the potter that shaped for him his thoughts. Inch by inch he had given up his ground, until he had learned. to write not that which would uplift the race, but that which the public wanted and would take in exchange for gold. The world ascribed to him. power; but he knew in his inmost heart that he was only a creature of the people's will. As for his dream of love, that had vanished; in his pursuit of success he had not had time to marry.

The organ passed from under his window and its discordant notes died in the distance, but the bitterness remained in his heart.

The youth on the bench mused on. His eyes followed the quick stride of

a merchant prince through the labyrinth of pedestrians. He thought of his mammoth store and his palatial residence. He thought of the great interests he controlled and the number of people dependent upon him for their daily bread. "It is enough," he said to himself; "he must be content."

But the merchant went on, striking blindly through the crowd, with the instinct of a wounded beast, seeking a hidden covert of the wood. He had sought to extend his business, to double his wealth and power, and he knew now that he was threatened with ruin. His fate was in the balance, and for hours he would not know the turning of the scale. As the crowd through which he hurried respectfully made way for him, he thought bitterly that to-morrow, if he were known to be a poor man, they would jostle him as rudely as a beggar on the street. His mind reverted to the past, and he asked himself if his career had been worth the sacrifices he had made for it. He had given up the higher culture of the mind in the routine of commercial life, until he had lost the appreciation of literature and art; he had given up the worshipping love of a good woman to marry a cold society belle whose alliance would advance his business interests. A forgotten bit of his mother's Bible repeated itself persistently in his mind: "For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Had he not bartered the highest things of life for gold?

He went on, wondering dully what his life would have been like if he had married the girl he loved; and for a moment the thought softened the bitterness of his face. But it hardened again as he entered the vestibule of his loveless home. Through the open drawing-room door he heard the murmur of voices. He knew them for those of his wife and the man whom society was beginning to call his rival. He passed noiselessly up the stairway, his features set in lines of regret and despair. But still the youth in the

park builded his cobweb nalaces of the fantasies of hope.

Slowly, with serious mien and thoughtful face, a man passed through the throng, and the youth's eyes followed him. He was a man whose voice from the pulpit had swayed the people for years, whose life had been a high example to the multitude. "Surely he must be content," sighed the youth, "not only from the success of his career, but from his noble deeds."

He

But in the man's face were lines of pain that were not visible to the youth; and he bent his way homeward with a heavy heart. In his study he sank into his luxurious chair, and rested his head on his hand. Through the open window came the faint hum of life from the streets below. looked about him at his books and pictures and busts; and there was something alien about the familiar scene. The face of Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration seemed to smite him. from its place on the wall with an accusing sense of guilt; and the thorn-crowned Ecce Homo looked at him as if he had placed the thorns anew on the bleeding brow. A faint breeze from the window blew across the table at his side, and some loose sheets of manuscript fluttered to his feet. He picked them up mechanically, and returned them to their place. But as he did so, some of the words caught his eye and burned themselves anew in his throbbing brain.

He saw behind him the years with their hopes and struggles and achievements; he saw before him uncertainty and the vague possibilities of a broken life. Around him were luxury and refinement and content; in his new environment he foresaw the marks of economy and privation and want. In the past were honor and the respect of

men; in the future, the brand of unfaithfulness to his vows. To-morrow he was to stand in the pulpit before the people he loved and renounce his ancient faith. He felt that already he had delayed the fatal moment too long. For weeks his lips had uttered what his heart had ceased to believe, and he had called himself a craven who feared to face the world. Now he knew that he must be true to himself if he deserved longer to be called a man, but breaking loose from the old familiar life was as hard as saying farewell to one's childhood home.

In the midst of his unhappy revery there was a faint tap on the door. "Come in," he said in a muffled voice. The door opened, and a beautiful woman entered the room. She came to his side and curved her arm about his neck. "Forgive me," he cried, brokenly, "for I have turned you and the little ones out of your home. I have made you the wife of a despised and disappointed man.”

She looked at the sheets of closely written paper before her; then she turned her eyes on the tortured face of the man.

"It has come at last?" she whispered, with a tightening of her arm about his neck.

"Yes," he replied; "it has come."

As she bent over him and kissed his brow, tears fell from her eyes on his uplifted face, and her heart mourned, not for the luxuries and the honors that were past, but for what to her were the blind gropings of his soul; for she held fast to the faith that he renounced.

In the park the shadows had deepened. The youth rose and turned toward home, his mind still musing on the lives of the men whom he had seen, and his heart aglow with enthusiasm and hope. It was well, for there was work in the world for him to do.

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HERE is a picture in my memory, with its details softened by the lapse of years, full of that dreamy mystery with which childhood invests those objects of the natural world which most appeal to its imagination. Standing upon the rocky crest of Wayte's Mount in the early morn, I looked upon a sea of mist that filled, almost to its brim, the valley below. Southward it spread a wide bay of shining light, its surface unbroken, save where in the nearer distance the long, smooth outlines of Sagamore and Powder Horn, in Chelsea, rising above the cloud, showed as green islands in the midst of a silver sea. Still farther away in the south, dimmed by their remoteness, arose the placid summits of the Blue Hills of Milton, a distant shore, on the extremest verge. Westward a broad river flowed at my feet, confined on the farther side by the rocky walls of the Middlesex Fells, whose bosky tops rose green above the intervening flood; while northward, hill upon hill, a wilderness of tangled forest stretched unbroken to the farthest horizon. As the day grew, the warmer rays of the sun and a gentle breeze dissolved the cloud of mist which had lain heavily upon the

lower lands. The wide sea and the flowing river rose in thin eddies of waving vapors; the green islands rested their broad bases on the dry land; and the distant shores, their azure summits growing rosy in the morning light, became more real as they joined the lower horizon, which carried in its extended circle a wide vision of land and sea. It was to my childish imagination as if the Spirit moving upon the waters had called from the depths the dry land, and it had arisen perfected and fitted for the uses of man.

Unknowing, I had seen as in a vision the story of the land which lay below. I had looked upon that sea which in some far-away geologic age joined the Mystic and the Bay of Nahant, covering the places of the marshes and swamps that intervene with deep waters. I had seen the rapid river, which, flowing down the valley of the Three Mile Brook, had

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From Barber's Historical Collection.

MALDEN IN 1837.

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BELL ROCK, THE SITE OF THE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE.

brought the waste of distant lands and deposited it in sheets and banks upon the shores and in the depths of the more quiet bay. It was a far cry from the arm of the salt sea and the rushing river to the pleasant valley of Mystic Side; but I had seen fertile fields and green groves rise in an hour out of the waters, as God had slowly brought them into being by mighty forces and the long lapse of years. It was the simulation of a creation.

So the land became fitted for man and awaited the time when "a chosen seed," selected in the vineyard of the church, should take possession of the Promised Land, which the first comers sought on the rocky shores and in the wildernesses of New England. It was a pleasant country which lay upon the eastern shore of the Mystic and which owned as its farthest habitable bounds, as the early comers thought, the line of rocky hills which stretch eastward from Wayte's Mount into Revere and Saugus. Pleasant it was,

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though the Spragues, who were the first white men who are known to have entered therein, represented it in 1629 to be "an uncouth wilderness."

They came from Naumkeag by the Saugus Plains and the Abousett, and apparently entered the present territory of Malden near Black Ann's Corner, by an Indian trail which was long known as the Salem Path. Passing through a valley in the Scadan Hills, they skirted Wayte's Mount and, crossing the Three Mile Brook, reached the ford at Mystic. Thence, continuing along the western bank of the river, they rested their tired feet at Mishawum. They found the country "full of stately timber"; and little

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THE OLD PARSONAGE. The Birthplace of Adoniram Judson.

else is reported of their observations. Perhaps the annoyances of "creeping beasts," or rattlesnakes, of wolves and mosquitoes, which later adventurers mention, prevented that careful survey of the country which otherwise might have been made; or a desire to be at the end of a weary way may have caused them to see little beyond the limits of their path.

They might have seen a land less a wilderness than that through which they directly passed. In the midst of primeval forests they would have found fresh meadows, in which grew luxuriant crops of native grasses, and broad salt marshes which yielded a plentiful product, which was long esteemed by the farmers. On the higher land towards the rivers and along the marshes were fertile fields, with a sunny southern exposure, almost bare of trees, which offered a soil ready for the plough and the seed. Wild fruits and game were abundant; and the country, to the eager eyes and imaginations of later comers, seemed indeed "a land of milk and honey."

It was towards the sea-lands that the attention of the settlers at Charlestown was first directed; and a narrow strip running from the old Boston line near Powder Horn Hill to the head of the North River was laid out along the head of the salt marshes in 1634, and divided in lots of five acres among the seventy-five householders of Charlestown. It was in this division that the name of Mystic Side, as applied to the territory now covered by the cities of Malden, Melrose and Everett, first appeared.

Soon after, a second division was made, by which the hay-lots on the salt marshes and in the fresh meadows above Wayte's Mount were granted; and in 1638, "the Greate Allotment" was completed. This division, with a reservation of about two hundred and sixty acres for later comers, covered all the land on the east side of the North River to the Scadan Fells and the Long Meadow by Pemberton's Creek, with a single range west of

Three Mile Brook, between the Salem Path and the marshes below Pleasant Street, and two lots in the vicinity of Middlesex Street.

On the west, the colonial grants of the Rev. John Wilson and Increase Nowell separated the Mystic Side lands from the Cradock or Medford grant until 1726, when they were annexed to Malden. On the east of Three Mile Brook, the special grants of Thomas Coytmore and Joseph Hills and a portion of the allotment of Walter Palmer occupied the larger part of the present fifth ward to Cross Street and the hills of Faulkner. Two years later, the reserved land was al

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lotted to newcomers in the town of Charlestown, and all the territory of the present cities of Malden and Everett, save a few scattered places retained for public purposes, became proprietary land, with the exception of the wild, rough hills of Tyot on the west and those of Scadan on the east.

There was little trouble with the Indians here, and the ownership of the lands of Mystic Side was most secure. The Rumney Marsh or Mystic Indians were open friends or secret and inactive enemies. An early deed of the lands from Mystic to "neere Salem," given by the Squa Sachem, was a warrant for possession; and unmeaning promises or artful delays se

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