was sent to the district school, having however learned his letters and to read the Bible at his mother's knee. The schoolhouse, as he recalls it, was as rude in construction, its desks as primitive and hacked, its seats as hard, and the discipline within it as harsh and unreasonable as any that historians have described or romancers painted. When he was five years old the family moved to Boston, living first on Essex Street and then on Fort Hill. He attended the primary school at the corner of Federal and High Streets until, at seven years of age, he was promoted to the Washington Grammar School.

At twelve years he graduated, receiving a Franklin medal. Having passed an examination, he became a pupil in the English High School. Here from various reasons he had the good fortune to be for two and a half of his three years' course under the immediate instruction of Thomas Sherwin, than whom no nobler man and no better teacher ever stood in a school-room. At the age of fifteen and one half years he graduated, again receiving a Franklin medal.

Long vacations were not in those days the fashion, either in schools or anywhere else. So in less than three weeks the boy found himself in the store of Thomas Tarbell & Co., wholesale dry-goods merchants. There he remained, passing through all the grades from errand-boy to book-keeper, four years and a half, leaving in March, 1843, to fit himself to enter Cambridge Divinity School. He studied one year and a half under

the direction of Rev. Chandler Robbins, and upon examination became a member of the Cambridge Divinity School, September, 1844, from which he graduated in June, 1847.

The first Sunday after he left the School he preached in the Unitarian church at Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and in January, 1848, was ordained as its pastor. February 7th, he married Lucy Maria Dodge, born September 15th, 1827, died February 18th, 1887. Here he remained something more than ten years, until he accepted a call to be the minister of the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts. Of this parish he was installed as minister July, 1858, and has remained there ever since, twenty-three years as active pastor, and afterwards as honorary pastor. In May, 1881, Mr. Reynolds was elected Secretary of the American Unitarian Association, which post he still holds. The position of minister of a large parish, or of the chief executive officer of a religious body, affords scanty leisure for literary pursuits and especially for writing not strictly in the line of official duty. Still, he has furnished eight or ten articles for denominational magazines, such as the Christian Examiner and the Unitarian Review, as many more for the Atlantic Monthly, while perhaps an equal number have appeared in pamphlet form or otherwise. In 1860 Harvard conferred on him the honorary degree of Master of Arts, and in 1894 that of Doctor of Divinity.

President Eliot used these words in conferring the degree of Doctor of Divinity:

"In rebus divinis oratorem eloquentem, administratorem prudentem, ab Unitariis rationibus suis optime praepositum."

KING PHILIP'S WAR;

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ATTACK ON BROOKFIELD IN AUGUST, 1675.

Read before THE AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY, OCTOBER 21, 1887.

THIS

HIS paper does not propose to give an account of King Philip's War, as a whole. To do that with any thoroughness would require a volume. It would rather confine itself to a statement of the reasons why the war happened to take place, and to a somewhat full sketch of a single event of that

war.

The subject has for me what I may call a traditional attraction. My ancestor, Captain Nathaniel Reynolds, was one of the original settlers, who after the war took possession of Mount Hope, the home of the Wampanoags, and named it Bristol. My great-grandfather, Benjamin Reynolds, was the first boy christened in the new town; while my grandfather, John Reynolds, and my father, Grindall Reynolds, first saw the light and were reared to manhood amid the associations of the ancient hamlet.

No historian, as it seems to me, has pointed out with sufficient clearness the causes which made this war, not only probable, but inevitable. A little sketch of the First Church, Bristol, Rhode Island, appeared in 1872. In that sketch you find this statement.

It

refers to the grant of the township in 1681.1 "The whole of Plymouth County was then settled, except this territory, which was the only spot left uncovered in the western march of English population." This is literally true. When the "Mayflower" dropped anchor off Plymouth the Wampanoags held the whole region as their hunting ground. Of this great tract all they retained in 1675 was a little strip, called then Mount Hope, scarcely six miles long and two miles wide. The southern line of English possession had been drawn right across Bristol Neck, enclosing, and almost imprisoning, the tribe in a little peninsula, washed on all sides, except the north, by the waters of Narragansett and Mount Hope bays. As if to emphasize this fact, their neighbors, the people of Swanzey, "set up a very substantial fence quite across the great neck." 2

That some freedom to fish and hunt in the old territory was granted is probable. But in the nature of the case each year narrowed its scope. narrowed its scope. Governor Winslow says, "Before these troubles broke out the English did not possess a single foot of land in the Colony but was fairly obtained from the Indians." 3 No doubt this may have been true. No less true was it that the owners of the soil hardly comprehended the meaning of transactions by which they sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. Even what remained was coveted. To protect them in it, in 1668 it was necessary to order, "that noe person shall . . . on any pretence whatsoever buy or receive any of those lands that

1 Historical Sketch of the First Church, Bristol, R. I., by J. P. Lane, p. 8.

2 Hubbard's Indian Wars. 4 Plymouth Laws, 221.

Plymouth Records, x. 363.