We have been thus particular in the description of this spot as it is the birth-place of two persons who will bear an important part in the tale we are about to relate, and partly, because we love this spot where we have whiled away many an hour of our boyish days. The peculiarities of one’s birth-place have much influence upon formation of the character and disposition. The associations that hang about us in childhood, have double weight upon our tender and susceptible minds at that time, to those of after days, when the character is more formed and matured, and the mind has become more stern and inflexible. It behoves us then to speak thus particularly of the birth-place and the associations of those who are to enact the principal characters in the drama which we relate. There lived at the very base of High Rock about seventy years ago, a few families of the real puritanic stock, forming a little community of themselves. The occupation of the male portion of the hamlet was that of fishermen, while the time of the females was occupied in drying and preserving the fish and such other domestic labor as fell to their lot. The neighborhood, resembled in every particular, save that it was far less extensive, the present town of Swampscot, which is situated but about three or four miles from the very spot we are now describing, and whose inhabitants, a hardy and industrious people, are absolutely to this day ‘fishermen all.’ The date to which we refer was just at the commencement of the principal causes of difference between the colonies and the mother country; the time when shrewd and thoughtful men foretold the coming struggle between England and her North American dependances. Already had the opposition of the colonies to the odious Stamp Act, and more particularly the people of Massachusetts Bay, as Boston and the neighboring province was named, become so spirited and universal that the British Parliament had only the alternative to compel submission or repeal the act, which was at length reluctantly done. Yet the continued acts of arbitrary oppression enforced by parliament upon the people, such as the passing of laws that those of the colonists charged with capital crimes, should be sent to England to be tried by a jury of strangers, and like odious and unconstitutional enactments had driven the people to despair, and prepared them by degrees for the after startling events that caused all Europe to wonder and England herself to tremble!