it must be what I pleased, or to that purpose."

Then there apparently proceeded one of those wrangles not peculiar to Puritan courtships, but in this case carried on with due Puritan decorum, which, as usual with persons in such relations, came to nothing, she holding her own. But the ending entry is delicious:

"She asked me if I would drink; I told her Yes. She gave me cider, apples, and a glass of wine; gathered together the little things I had given her and offered them to me; but I would take none of them. Told her I wished her well, should be glad to hear of her welfare. She seemed to say she would not take in hand a thing of this nature. Thanked me for what I had given her and desired my prayers. I gave Abijah Weld an Angel. Got home about 9 at night. My bowels yearn towards Mrs. Dennison; but I think God directs me in his Providence to desist."

We catch one more glimpse of the lady, Lord's Day, Nov. 30, when, in the evening, while Sewall was at family prayers:

"She came in, preceded by her cousin Weld, saying she wished to speak to me in private. I was very much startled that she should come so far afoot in that exceeding cold season. She asked pardon if she had affronted me.

Seemed inclined the match should not break off, since I had kept her company so long. I fetched a tankard of cider and drank to her. She desired that nobody might know of her being here. I told her they should not. She went away in the bitter cold, no moon being up, to my great pain. I saluted her at parting."

The last glimpse of Mrs. Dennison in the Diary is this:

"Dec. 22. Mrs. Dorothy Dennison brings an additional inventory. I gave her her oath; asked her brother Brewer and her to dine with me; she said she needed not to eat; caused her to sit by the fire and went with her to the door at her going away. She said nothing to me nor her brother Brewer."

Mrs. Dennison remarried in 1720, Sewall having already taken to wife Mrs. Tilly whom he had formerly considered, and then set aside because they could not agree upon the terms of settlement. This lady died when they had been married but a short time and then the twice-widowed judge began after an interval of only four months, this time to pay attentions to Mrs. Winthrop, a highly eligible widow. The ardent fashion in which this lady was pursued by the venerable justice I have

elsewhere described. But the courtship came to nothing, because Sewall would not agree to set up a coach nor wear a periwig. He soon found another woman less exacting, however, and her he blithely took to be his third wife, thought he was now over seventy. She survived him, for he died Jan. 1, 1730. He sleeps in death in the Old Granary Burying Ground almost on the very spot where he long ago had his home.

"Romance of Old New England Churches."

XIII

IN THE REIGN OF THE ROYAL GOVERNORS

THE year in which Sewall died marked the appointment of Jonathan Belcher as governor of Massachusetts. He was the sixth governor to be sent out by the crown and the third who was a native of the province. But he succeeded in his office no better than the gentlemen who had preceded him, the wrangling which had become a regular feature of legislative life here marring his administration as it had done those of his predecessors. Belcher was the son of a prosperous Boston merchant and a graduate of Harvard College. He was polished and sociable and had had the benefit of extensive travel. But he found himself in an impossible situation and the only thing for him to do was to make as few enemies as possible and wait for death or the king to remove him. People who for two generations had been practically independent were not going to take

kindly to any appointee of a throne they were determined to find tyrannical.

Of course the opposition was by no means unanimous. Quite a few persons there were in Boston and its nearby towns to whom the old régime, with its subserviency to men like the Mathers, had been noxious in the extreme, and they naturally welcomed the change. But to most of those who in lineage, sentiment, and habit, represented the first planters the foisting upon New England of a royal governor, bound in loyalty to a far-off king, was an affront to be neither forgiven nor condoned. Though the holder of this office had been a man of superhuman breadth and of extraordinary generosity he would not have been acceptable to this portion of the inhabitants. William Phips had been indigenous to a degree found in no man elected by the people. But he suited neither the Mathers, who nominated him, nor the common people who hated the Mathers. Even the Earl of Bellomont, the "real lord " who succeeded Phips, got on better with the captious people who moulded public opinion in Boston than did this Maine carpenter.

For a time, indeed, it looked as if Bellomont were going to get on very well indeed. A vigorous man of sixty-three, fine looking, with