Beyond the western point of Suconeset headland, looking off to the light-ship on the Shoals and to the shining bluffs of Martha’s Vineyard, lies, on the sea, a tract of neglected land called the “MacGrego Farm.” It is encircled by a dike, now overgrown and not more than three feet in height, although originally six feet high. On the eastern side, where the cart-road runs, is an opening in the wall, and inside this are a few fruit-trees, now grown wild, and a bit of sward, which plainly mark the former seat of a dwelling. The “MacGrego Farm” has a story. Among the prisoners captured in the Revolution was a young fellow named MacGregor, the son of an English clergyman, who, after getting a classical education, ran away from home, from love of adventure, and shipped on an English privateer. Being captured, he was held as a prisoner until the close of the war, and on regaining his freedom he came from Boston, with some of the Hessians, to look after salt-works on this shore, in the interest of Boston merchants. Among the Indians was an orphan girl of sixteen, tall and good-looking, called Mercy Moses. The late Captain Peter Lewis, of Waquoit, a very intelligent man, who knew both her and Thomas MacGregor in their later years, said that when advanced in age Mercy was as straight as an arrow. Some persons now living at Mashpee also knew her, among them Deacon Matthias. Amos and his wife, who, before her marriage, taught school near Mercy’s wigwam. Mercy Moses had inherited this tract of which we have spoken and another parcel of land upon the sea, on Suconeset headland. Thomas MacGregor succumbed to the charms of the Indian girl, and married her, and they made their home upon the “MacGrego Farm,” as it came to be called. He was a man of great bodily strength and activity; his farming was celebrated all through the region, and people used to come from other places to see his crops. About 1812, we are told, the farm was flooded by an unusual tide. Probably it was in 1815, when the tides, helped by a tremendous gale, rose so high in Buzzard’s Bay as nearly to overflow the isthmus and make the Cape for the time an island, lodged a schooner in the woods, and set a sloop down like a foundling--a perfectly natural foundling for Cape Cod--before the door of a house. Although the tide did not flow so high in the Vineyard Sound, the MacGrego farm, low lying, was flooded; and, for fear of another deluge, MacGregor threw up, by his own labor, a dike six feet in height around the whole forty acres. Although he staid at Mashpee all his days, and built a barn for his cattle, he himself lived in a wigwam to the day of his death. The neighboring ministers (who were probably all college-bred men) used to visit him.