As Nathan took them home from the State House he led them down Beacon Street. This is a beautiful street, making the north side of Boston Common. Where the Common ends, Charles Street crosses Beacon Street nearly at right angles. Near this corner, on land now built upon, or perhaps crossed by some street, was the cottage of Blackstone, who lived in Boston for six or seven years before Governor Winthrop and the settlers of 1630 arrived.
They made their first settlement at Charlestown on the other side of the river. The records of Charlestown say: “Mr. Blackstone, dwelling on the other side of Charles River, alone, at a place called by the Indians, Shawmut, where he had a cottage at, or not far from the place called Blackstone Point, came and acquainted the Governor of an excellent spring, inviting and soliciting him thither.”
Blackstone’s house, or cottage, in which he lived, together with the nature of his improvements, was such as to authorize the belief that he had resided there some seven or eight years. How he became possessed of his lands here is not known; but it is certain he held a good title to them, which was acknowledged by the settlers under Winthrop, who, in course of time, bought his lands of him, and he removed out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts to the valley of the Blackstone River.
Of Blackstone’s personal history Nathan afterward read them this note, by Mr. Charles F. Adams:
“He was in no respect an ordinary man. His presence in the peninsula of Shawmut, in 1630, was made additionally inexplicable from the fact that he was about the last person one would ever have expected to find there. He was not a fisherman, nor a trader, nor a refugee: he was a student, an observer, and a recluse. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he had received Episcopal ordination in England. In 1630 he was in his thirty-fifth year. All this is extremely suggestive, for it goes to make of him exactly the description of man who would naturally be found in company with the scholarly and unobtrusive Morell. Further, the probabilities would strongly point to him as Winthrop’s authority where Winthrop, in 1631, speaks of a species of weather record going back seven years since this bay was planted by Englishmen.”
The Second Day.
As the various travelers told their times that evening, a certain plan was laid out for the next day, in which the two ladies agreed to join. And it was finally agreed that they should lunch down town with the gentlemen, and should take the elevator at the “Equitable” Insurance Company, so that the two mothers might have something to substitute for the view the children had had from the State House.
This plan may be recommended to lady travelers. The view is not as sweeping on the west as that from the State House. But, on other sides, it is equally satisfactory. And you can go up by steam—a great matter when you have passed forty years.
But before lunch Nathan took them to the head of State Street, to the “Old State House.”