"My maisters whar is your harts? now show your courage, you have oft complained to me so and so; now is ye tyme if you will doe any thing, I will stand by you."
He returned more choleric than before, calling those he met rebels and traitors, in his mad fury. They put him under guard, until his wrath had time to cool, and set their invention to work. He was compelled to pass through a double file of musketeers, every one of whom "was ordered to give him a thump on ye brich, with ye but end of his musket," and was then conveyed to the water-side, where a boat was in readiness to carry him away. They then bid him go and mend his manners. The idea of the gantlet was, I suspect, borrowed from the Indians.
This little colony of pilgrims was at first a patriarchal community. Every thing was in common. Each year an acre of land was allotted to every inhabitant to cultivate. The complete failure of the experiment ought to stand for a precedent, though it seems somehow to have been forgotten. Men, they found, would not work for the common interest as for themselves, and so the idea of a community of dependents was abandoned for an association of independent factors. From this time they began to get on. The rent-day did not trouble them. "We are all freeholders," writes Edward Hilton home to England. In 1626 the planters bought themselves free of the undertakers, who oppressed them with ruinous charges for every thing furnished the colony. Allerton, who was sent over in 1625 to beg the loan of one hundred pounds sterling, was obliged to pay thirty pounds in the hundred interest for the two hundred pounds he had obtained. In the year 1627 they divided all their stock into shares, giving each person, or share, twenty acres of land, besides the single acre already allotted.
THE ALLYNE HOUSE.
It is time to resume our walk down Leyden Street. On reaching the bluff before mentioned the street divides, one branch descending the declivity toward the water, while the other skirts the hill-side. The Universalist Church at the corner marks the site of the Allyne House, an ancient dwelling demolished about 1826. By the Plymouth records, it appears that, in 1699, Mr. Joseph Allyne married Mary Doten, daughter of Edward, and granddaughter of that Edward Doten who had come in the Mayflower. Among the children of Joseph Allyne born in the old homestead was Mary, who became the mother of that "flame of fire," James Otis. The house commanded a fine view of the bay, its foundations being higher than the chimneys in the streets below. It may not, perhaps, be generally known that James Otis, after completing his studies in the office of Jeremiah Gridley, then the most eminent lawyer in the province, came from Boston to Plymouth, where he took an office in the main street. He practiced there during the years 1748-'49, when his talents called him to a broader field.
Mercy, the sister of James Otis, married James Warren, a native of Plymouth. He succeeded General Joseph Warren as president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, but is better known as the author of the celebrated "Committee of Correspondence," which he proposed to Samuel Adams while the latter was at his house. Mrs. Warren, at the age of seventy, was visited by the Duke De Liancourt. "She then retained," he says, "the activity of mind which distinguished her as a sister of James Otis; nor had she lost the graces of person or conversational powers, which made her still a charming companion." For reasons apparent to the reader, she resolved not to send her "History of the Revolution" to the press during her husband's lifetime.
