ruary 6, 1756), the assembly building at Princeton was so nearly completed that the College of New Jersey was able to add a local habitation to its well-earned name. To Princeton, therefore, the president and his family removed late in the year 1756, and it was from this place that Esther Burr wrote this significant description of Aaron, then thirteen months old: "Aaron is a little dirty, noisy boy, very different from Sally almost in everything. He begins to talk a little; is very sly and mischievous. He has more sprightliness than Sally, and most say he is handsome, but not so good tempered. He is very resolute, and requires a good governor to bring him to terms."

That very good governor, his father, who might have made such a difference in the life of this second Aaron Burr, was only a few months later taken out of the world

at the early age of forty-two. The labour of establishing Princeton on a firm foundation had been too much for him, and so it came about that Esther Burr was, when scarcely twenty-five, left a widow. with two young children, one three and the other less than two years old. Her heartbroken letters to her father written about this time show very clearly how terribly she suffered in her bereavement, and foreshadow her own early death. Scarcely had Edwards been inaugurated president of the College of New Jersey to succeed the lamented husband, when both he and Mrs. Burr died of smallpox. In the fall of the same year Jonathan Edwards's widow, who had gone to Philadelphia with the intention of conveying little Aaron Burr and his sister Sarah to her own home, there to bring them up in careful, godly fashion, was seized with a dread

disease and herself passed to the bourne from which no traveller returns. Thus within a period of thirteen months these children were of father, mother, and grandparents all bereft. And there was left in the wide world absolutely no one whose chief concern it could be to see that they received no detriment.

It

A thing almost as beautiful as Jonathan Edwards's youthful rhapsody concerning his child-wife, was his death-bed message to her, - the one woman of his life. was noticed by those attending him that he said but little. There were none of the raptures peculiar to the "saint of God," no allusions to his books, to the labours of his life, or to the fortunes of the Church. But he spoke to his daughter words thus recorded: "Give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her that

the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever."

A COLONIAL FRIAR LAURENCE

A

NY one who should expect to find the life of a mission minister in colonial days altogether prosaic and barren of romance would be greatly astonished upon dipping into the history of the Reverend Arthur Browne, first rector of St. John's Church, Portsmouth, N. H. This parish, alive and prosperous to-day, has been in existence ever since 1732, when right on the present site the English Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts" started its first mission in Portsmouth. In Mr. Browne," a man of real culture, unpretentious goodness, and eminent worth," was soon found