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practice of medicine, towards which his early education had been directed. His practice extended into the neighboring towns; and one at least of his favorite remedies was in use and repute for more than a century and a half. Not only his townspeople but others gave him honor; and it appears that the presidency of Harvard College had been offered to him, even before his people had restored him to favor. For a little more than ten years he remained the beloved teacher of the Malden church, and at the end peacefully fell asleep, "Finnished his Work and Entred apon an Eternal Sabbath of Rest on ye Lords Day Iune ye 10 1705 in ye 74 Year of his Age." In the little burying ground at Sandy Bank, on a stone once leaning and covered with moss, but now upright and clean, one may read this homely and loving couplet:

HERE LIES INTERD IN SILENT GRAUE
BELOW
MAULDENS PHYSICIAN

FOR SOUL AND BODY Two.

An uncanny and romantic spot was that little ground, where the Puritan poet sleeps in the midst of those who neglected or loved him, before the hand of improvement raised its sinking stones and cleared them of the lichens of years. Over the neglected graves wild brambles wove their tangled masses of briers, of white blossoms, or of shining berries, to

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THE FAULKNER SCHOOL.

ELISHA S. CONVERSE.

is in favor of the dead, who by piety long continued has attained a state to which the reader may never come.

There is a grewsome story of one who, dying, swore with a horrible oath that he would never decay like common folk. Nor decay did he; but his flesh grew brown and hard, and so it remained, to the terror of the ignorant and the wonder of the learned. A medical student sawed off the head, but, becoming frightened, he threw it into a clump of bushes, where it was found securely bagged for transportation. After that the tomb, with its slight wooden door, in the old fashion, was never long closed. Mischievous boys in the daytime entered and shook the poor head in horrible

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which never a gatherer came; and the glee; but at night it was a place to be

red barberry, when the frosts came, dropped its

acid fruit, unheeded, upon the unshorn turf. Slow-growing cedars, here and there, pushed aside the crumbling stones, or covered with their thin and odorous boughs, as with a mantle. of pity, the failing records beneath. In the summer it was a wild medley of clustering field

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flowers and verdant brake, a place of escaped from her friends had passed

sunken graves, dangerous pitfalls. hidden below the deceitful green; and in the fall, the sweet everlasting spread its balmy breath over the decaying leaves. It was a place neither for joy nor for sorrow; for there were never heard the gladsome voices of children at play, and seldom the sobs of the mourner. The dead who were there had rested long years, and they who had slept beyond the memory of the living had never a claim for pity or for grief. There is little of hope in the rude memorials which the fathers placed over their sleepers; for if, in the midst of denunciations and warnings to the living, some little semblance of a tender thought appears, it

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the night in that dismal lodging-place. Tradition says that the young man grew melancholy and died a few years later from the effects of his fright. After that the authorities buried the entrance of the tomb deep below earth and sod. When I see the symmetrical mound which still remains, I wonder if the poor body below has fulfilled its penance and returned to its native dust.

New England; nor less hardy and persistent than their brethren of the other towns were the men of Malden. Undismayed by adverse circumstances of church and state, they felled the forests and subdued the land, building their rude homes, laying out and defining roads, and enacting their simple and homely laws, which, ridiculous or cruel as they sometimes appear, bore in them the germs of

It was a hardy strain which peopled morality, of good citizenship and free

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INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY.

dom. For the commonweal they stood firmly in opposition to tyranny and usurpation, and gave freely of their blood and goods for the common defence. In the disastrous and bloody Philip's War, though removed from the scene of hostilities, they bore their part; and fifty-two inhabitants of Malden, sufferers by the war, received aid from the Irish Charity, a contribution which Ireland sent to the relief of the Christian brethren in New England. At least seventy of the men of the little town were in active service, of whom many were members of the redoubtable Three County Three County Troop, the memory of whose deeds may long have lingered by the hearths of the countryside, but has perished with the crimson standard of silk which led them to victory. Another was the brave and active Lieutenant Phineas Upham, who fell in the great Narragansett Fight, and dying, was buried in the ground at Sandy Bank.

The overthrow of the Indian confederacy, by the defeat and death of Philip, and the summary ending of the unpopular adminis

tration of Governor Andros, with the establishment of a permanent provincial government, gave a new life to the spreading settlements of Massachusetts Bay. In Malden, as elsewhere, the farms grew larger as the active arms of the hardy yeomen beat the forests backward, and the acreage of grazing and plant

ing land increased. In 1695 the last great aggregation of common lands, comprising about thirty-five hundred acres and embracing, with the exception of a few scattered lots and plantations, the whole of the present city of Melrose and the district of Greenwood in Wakefield, was allotted to the seventy-four freeholders of the town.

After the decease of Mr. Wigglesworth, the ecclesiastical affairs of the town were unsettled; and in a spiritual sense the community was in a condition altogether forlorn. Contentions divided the people. Minister after minister was considered or called without avail, the town hindering the church, or the church opposing the town in matters of choice, or both uniting in that which was inexpedient or which came to naught in the end.

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THE MALDEN HOSPITAL.

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