from the sacred edifice to Griffin's Wharf, there to celebrate the Great American Tea Party.

Yet it is not of the history of the Old South Meeting-House that I mean to write, for many people have done that interestingly and well. Rather do I choose to twine about the walls of this old building the clinging ivy of one man's life-story, the man selected being Judge Samuel Sewall, the noblest Roman of them all, who, in 1696, stood up manfully in his pew at this church while his confession of wrong in accepting "spectral evidence" during the witchcraft trials at Salem was read aloud by one of the ministers.

It is always of Sewall that I think when I go to the Old South Church - though I know perfectly well that he made his confession in the old cedar meeting-house

1 See "Romance of Old New England Rooftrees."

which preceded this brick structure — and that he died just before the present building was dedicated. But I can fancy how excited he must have grown in his old age over the elaborate preparations necessary to the erection of so fine a church as this so long ago as 1730, and I like to think of the things he must have written down somewhere about the undertaking, in accordance with his lifelong habit of diary-keeping. Moreover, when all is said, it was this very place that Sewall frequented and this very spot which he hallowed by that noble confession and by the sternly kept fast days that followed. The letters "S. S." on the stone at the northwest corner may be held to do him fitting reverence for these brave acts. Here, too, it was that he was wont to come with his blooming wife Hannah, the daughter of Captain John Hull, Mintmaster, and here

that he used to listen with scarcely concealed pride to the sermons of son Joseph," of which his famous diary says so much. It was likewise here that as an old man he cast sheep's eyes at the women "in the Fore Seat" eligible to gladden his desolate hearth. And while walking home from worship in this place it was that he weighed, as we shall see, the comparative merits of the ladies in question.

In Hawthorne's fascinating account of Samuel Sewall's first courtship occurs this important sentence: "The mintmaster was especially pleased with his new son-in-law because he had courted Miss Betsy out of pure love and had said nothing at all about her portion." It is good for us to remember that passage when we read the stories of Judge Sewall's later courtships. For the fact that the first marriage was one of purely romantic love—even if Sewall

did get his wife's weight in pine-tree shillings when he got her rather takes the taint of the sordid from the later episodes, There is no need to tell at length the pretty story of Betsy Hull, for it has become a part of American tradition. John Hull, we all remember, had been made mintmaster of the colony and had grown very rich. Then one day a fine young man, Samuel Sewall by name, came courting his daughter, and, meeting the requirements of the situation as to character and education, was readily given the consent of the fair one's fond father. This father had replied to the ardent youth's suit, as a bluff parent of the period well enough might, "Take her, but you'll find her a heavy enough burden." "Yet when the wedding ceremony was over," according to the tale of the Great American Romancer, "the bridegroom was given a surprise which

made him rejoice indeed that the new Mrs. Sewall was a plump young woman.

"Captain Hull whispered a word or two to his men servants, who immediately went out and soon returned, lugging in a large pair of scales. They were such a pair as wholesale merchants use for weighing bulky commodities; and quite a bulky commodity was now to be weighed in them.

"Daughter Betsy,' said the mintmaster, get into one side of these scales.'

Miss Betsy-or Mrs. Sewall, as we must now call her did as she was bid like a dutiful daughter without any question of the why and wherefore. But what her father could mean unless to make her husband pay for her by the pound (in which case she would have been a dear bargain), she had not the least idea.

"And now,' said honest John Hull to the servants, bring that box hither.'