enthusiasm. No doubt Peter Rugg drove swiftly along this highway pursued by the inevitable thunderstorm. Here, too, rumbled the famous coaches of the Great Eastern Stage Company, bound for Portland and the District of Maine.

The Choate Bridge, with its low Norman arches, is a famous old structure, built in 1764 under the direction of Col. John Choate, who commanded a regiment at Louisburg and was a member of the Provincial Government for thirty-five years. The bridge was built at the expense of the County of Essex and is one of the oldest arch bridges in the country. It stands to-day as firmly as it did that October morning when the supporting timbers were knocked away from below. The stone used in its construction was taken from the stone walls and rocky pastures near at hand and shows no finish at the joints. Of course a careful selection was made of the more suitable for forming the arches, but it is really wonderful that with this material such graceful lines could be built upon with perfect accuracy, the more so, when we consider that the builder probably never had seen an arch of stone in his life.

The large mill above the bridge gives employment to many foreigners who usually live in houses of doubtful antiquity. This picturesque bit of angles and overhanging construction is suggestive of the name "Little Italy”—which has been locally applied.

But a step from the bridge stands what was formerly the old "Ross Tavern," built in 1735, and on the steep bank on the opposite side of the river is a large building, with mansard roof, where Mary Lyon and Zilpah P. Grant conducted the Ipswich Female Seminary, a famous old-time school, where Andover Theological students were wont to find helpmates and sharers of their joys and uncertainties.

The First Meeting-house stands upon a level spot among the ledges on Meeting-house Green. It was here

that Rev. George Whitefield preached to an audience numbering thousands and with such power that Satan discomfited rushed up the stairs leading to the steeple, leaped to the ground and for a time abandoned his work in the vicinity. The print of his cloven foot may yet be seen on the ledge at the left of the entrance to the meetinghouse.

And still on each Sunday the Parson prays
To be kept from the Devil and all his ways,
And the sexton labors to scare him as well,
By ringing and swinging the Ipswich bell.

And an Ipswich bell has also rung a curfew since 1656, when the town first so ordered.

In the rear of the meeting-house formerly stood the stocks and the whipping-post and hard by was the jail where were confined the Quaker and witchcraft victims. Giles Corey made his last will and testament while in this prison. It is a short walk to Town Hall and the old burying ground, where on the right-hand side of the main path may be found a stone bearing the date of 1647. From the crest of the hill a magnificent prospect of hilltop and ocean shore is suddenly unfolded. The river, burnished silver bright, winds in and out seeking its narrow passage into the Bay. Plum Island, the Isles of Shoals, the blue peak of old Agamenticus and the faint outlines of distant New Hampshire mountains, and inland a rolling succession of hills, circling the line of horizon, Annisquam and Cape Ann gracefully sweeping to the southeast, and just beneath, the broad salt marshes dotted with haycocks. The long hill at the right of the mouth of the river is Castle Hill. At the extreme left may be seen Little Neck, with summer cottages dotting the steep incline, while between these guardians of the river's flow may be seen the Bay, stretching away as far as the eye can reach. A white sail is coming into the river and near the Neck we may imagine the canoes and pleasure boats of many a happy party.

But we must return to our river, passing down High Street, more popularly known as Pudding Street, from the fact or tradition that some mischievous boys once stole a pudding from the oven in which it was baking and kicked it up and down the street. Here in former times lived the Colonial Governors, Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet, and here Anne Bradstreet, "the Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America," wrote many of her best poems, "with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight." At the foot of the street is anchored a flotilla of fishermen's dories. Ship Yard Lane, with two clammer's houses at its foot, is to be seen rising and disappearing in the background. Town Hill is at the extreme right. This is tidewater, and a short distance down the stream is the coal wharf where the diminutive river steamer receives passengers for the delightful sail down the river to the Bluffs and then along Plum Island River to Oldtown in Newbury, by many a marshy bank and reedy shoal where: "The host of hay-cocks seem to float

With doubles in the water,"

while the windy sand dunes of Plum Island follow our winding way the entire distance.

Near the wharf is the house in which lived Harry Main, pirate, smuggler and wrecker, who followed the wicked trade of building fires on the sands, in order to decoy vessels among the breakers. For these crimes, at his death, he was doomed to be chained to the bar which extends across the mouth of the river, there forever to coil a cable of sand. When an easterly storm rises the cable will break, and his yells of baffled rage can be heard for miles around. Old people living on Plum Island, from which the bar extends, used to say that Harry Main's ghost troubled them by wandering about the sand hills on stormy nights, so that they were afraid to venture out of doors after dark.

The oldest legend in Ipswich is associated with Heartbreak Hill and accounts for its name. The hill is on our

right, as we float down the river on the last stage of our journey. The name was familiarly applied by the earliest settlers; in fact, it appears upon the records of the town as early as 1638, and is without doubt as old as the settlement. In brief the legend relates the romantic story of an Indian girl who fell in love with a white sailor from one of the fishingvessels that frequented the coast in those early times, and upon his sailing across the sea she used to climb this hill and pass her days watching for his return. But the months and years went by without bringing tidings from him, and the deserted one pined away and at last died of a broken heart.

Through the broad levels of marshland the river loiters quietly down to the sea. The tide brings in a few clammer's boats, but seldom anything larger. In Revolutionary times fifty coasters and fishermen were registered at Ipswich; to-day, a small schooner comes floating up the river laden with coal, or a sloop brings stone for building purposes. The commerce of the Agawam vanished on the same tide that bore away the pride of other ports in Essex County. Before leaving the town we must ask some venerable citizen to relate the picturesque story of the great Ipswich fright of April 21, 1775; for it is said that the appearance in the lower river of two men-of-war tenders, full of British soldiers, led to that remarkable scene of indescribable terror and confusion, affecting the whole countryside and reaching as far as Exeter, N. H. The town was deserted. Large numbers fled from the scene, and crossing the Merrimac, spent the night in the deserted houses of Salisbury whose inhabitants, stricken by the same strange terror, had fled to New Hampshire to take up their lodgings in dwellings also abandoned by their owners. Whittier has pictured all the terrors and absurdities of the Ipswich fright-the man who got his family into a boat to go to Ram Island for safety and, imagining that he was pursued by the enemy through the dusk of evening, told his wife to throw the crying child overboard, "or we shall all be

discovered and killed"; the poor woman who ran three or four miles up the river and then discovered to her horror that she had brought off the cat instead of the baby; these and many other tales have been preserved by the Quaker poet. He relates that at midnight a horseman, clad only in shirt and breeches, dashed up to his grandfather's door at Haverhill, twenty miles up the Merrimac, and shouted, "Turn out! Get a musket! Turn out! The regulars are landing on Plum Island!" "I'm glad of it," responded the old gentleman from his chamber window, "I wish they were all there and obliged to stay there." When we recall that Plum Island is little more than a naked ridge of sand, the benevolence of this wish can readily be appreciated.

And now, with one last glimpse of the spires of old Ipswich town, we float past a steep bank and then begin to follow the tortuous channel of the river as it flows through the salt marshes down to the sea. The broad level stretch of thatch grass is interrupted here and there by little wooded islands of upland, and frequently the muddy bank, on either side of the river, is broken by the flow of an intersecting creek, or "crick," as the native pronounces it. Argilla and Labor-in-Vain are on our right and Jeffries Neck is at the left. Here, the Tarrantines from the eastward battled with the Agawams as late as August, 1631, and in shell heaps not far away evidences of cannibal feasts have been found, parts of human bones, together with the bones of bears, moose, fish and birds.

In early times the hills on either side were heavily wooded; now, scarcely a shrub breaks the monotony. Little Neck, with its colony of summer cottages, is at the mouth of the river and on the opposite side is Castle Hill, with the hard sandy beach sweeping in graceful curve at its base, and just beyond and rising from the midst of the white sand dunes is the Ipswich lighthouse, and nearby is the cottage where lives in lonely seclusion the keeper and his family. The lighthouse was built in 1837, and is equipped with a white flashlight. The range light marking