Shirley, after four years’ absence, during which he had been employed in an unsuccessful mission to Paris about the Acadian boundaries, came back to Boston in 1753, to be kindly received, but to feel in bringing with him a young Catholic wife, whom he had married in Paris, the daughter of his landlord, that he gave her the position of the first lady in the province not without environing himself and her with great embarrassment, in a community which, though it had departed widely from the puritanism of the fathers, was still intolerant of much that makes man urbane and merry. While Shirley had been gone, the good town had been much exercised over an attempt to introduce the drama, and the performance of Otway’s _Orphan_ at a coffee-house in King Street had stirred the legislature to pass a law against stage plays. The journals of Goelet[301] and others give us some glimpses of life, however, far from prudish, and show that human nature was not altogether suppressed, nor all of the good people quite as stiff as Blackburn was now painting them. Notwithstanding his hymeneal entanglement, Shirley was unquestionably the most powerful Englishman at this time in America. The fortuitous success of his Louisbourg expedition had given him a factitious military reputation.[302] A test of it seemed imminent. For the sixth time in eighty years the frontiers were now ravaged by the savages. Pepperrell was sent to pacify the eastern Indians. The French were stretching a cordon of posts from the Atlantic to the gulf which alarmed Shirley, and he doubted if anything was safe to the eastward beyond the Merrimac, unless the French could be pushed back from Nova Scotia. He feared New Hampshire would be lost, and with it the supply of masts for the royal navy. A road had been cut along the Westfield River through Poontoosuck (Pittsfield) to Albany, and Shirley planned defences among the Berkshire Hills. At this juncture a conference of the colonies was called at Albany in 1754, which had been commanded through the governor of New York by the Board of Trade. The reader will find its history traced on a later page. Hutchinson in July brought back to Boston a draft of the plan of action. In the autumn the legislature was considering the question, while Franklin was in Boston (October-December) conferring with Shirley and discussing plans. Boston held a town meeting and denounced the Albany plan, and in December (14th) the legislature definitely rejected it, as all the other colonies in due time did. Rhode Island, particularly, was very vigilant, lest an attempt might be made to abridge her charter-privileges. Connecticut established its first press in this very year, which with the press of the other colonies, was lukewarm or hostile to the plan.[303]