Judge Story was born in the antiquated, primeval fishing town of Marblehead; a town presenting such a rocky and barren surface, that when Whitfield entered it for the first time, he was fain to inquire, "Pray, where do they bury their dead?" Story himself speaks of his birth-place as "a secluded fishing town, having no general connection with other towns, and, not being a thoroughfare, without that intercourse which brings strangers to visit it, or to form an acquaintance with its inhabitants." In fact it could not well be a thoroughfare, since it leads only from Salem to the sea, and the inhabitants of the latter town have a sufficiently ready access of their own. But though Marblehead with its scanty soil, and its isolated position, is neither an Eden nor a thoroughfare, it is at least a stout old place where men are grown; where an entire regiment was furnished for the cause of American Independence, completely officered and manned by brave men, to whom the dangers of war were but a continuation of previous lives of peril, and who supplied besides more privateers than history has recorded, to harass the enemy upon an element with which they were more familiar. The town of Marblehead is supported by the fishery business. A large portion of its inhabitants are simple fishermen, whose manhood is passed in voyages to the Great Banks, and voyages back; a constant succession of those perils which are incident to the sea, with long winter evenings of sailors' yarns and ghost stories, in one monotonous round, till they finally depart "On that drear voyage from whose night The ominous shadows never lift." It was among a population of this kind, and at a time when a long and disastrous war had crippled their resources, that the youthful Story began with his accustomed enthusiasm to acquire that education whose root is bitter when grown in the most favorable soil. Without advantages of good schooling, or a plentiful supply of books, he did what thousands of others, great and small, have done and are doing; that is, he acquired an education without the modern improvements on which our boys rely, and whose value their parents and teachers are so apt to over-estimate. In the shop of the Marblehead barber, the village great men assembled to hear the news, and to hold forth upon the condition and prospects of the young republic, as well as to have their ambrosial locks powdered and their beards removed. Here, in place of the modern lecture room, our young hero resorted, and listened reverently to oracular utterances from wise mouths in the intervals of the shaving brush and the razor. The village barber himself, endowed with an easy garrulity, more natural and professional than the stately reserve of his metropolitan brother, could, at his leisure, retail the wisdom of his many councillors, diluted to the point where it admitted of the mental digestion of a child.