Doctor James Thacher, who studied with Hersey and served as a surgeon in the Revolution, died, in 1844, at the age of ninety. Doctor Leonard, of Sandwich, born in 1763 and practising for sixty years, had the enviable reputation of being patient with chronic invalids, prompt in epidemics or “occasional” diseases—in short, a good Christian and a good doctor. He was succeeded by his son, who links up the profession, in the memory of the living with Doctor Gould, of Brewster. Vast, kindly, skilful, sympathetic with his patients to his own hurt, rather silent, who can forget him on his errands of mercy as he drove from house to house or town to town in the “sulky” that was so exact a fit for his bulk the wonder was he must not always carry it upon his back as the snail his shell. It was an ordeal then for a child to be stood on a chair and have that Jovine ear applied to back and chest in lieu of a stethoscope. “Have you a phial?” inquired Jove of the parent after one such test. Later a terrified infant was abstracted from the depths of a broom-cupboard. “O mother, mother, what is a phial?” cried the victim of his fears. The early parsons were often, as we have seen, of a fine type—English university men usually, who had travelled far in their quest of freedom. They were perforce, in the new country, farmers as well as clergymen, and one of them, the Reverend John Avery, of Truro, practised, in addition, the arts of doctor, lawyer, and smith. It is written of him that he “manifested great tenderness for the sick, and his people very seriously felt their loss in his death.” He came to them in 1711, and lived active, beneficent years among them until his death in 1754. These Cape pastorates frequently covered a great span of years. In its first century the West Parish of Barnstable had but two ministers. In 1828 died the Reverend Timothy Alden, of Yarmouth, after a tenure of fifty-nine years. Alden was more truly of the soil than many of his brethren, as he was in direct line from John of the Mayflower. He was a man of wit in the choice of his texts: “Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out,” brought forth on the Monday his stipulated firewood that had been lacking; and to a critic he gave answer on the following Sabbath: “The word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.” Mr. Freeman remembers that Alden was the last to wear the Revolutionary costume. As late as 1824 he saw him at an ordination: “his antique wig conspicuous, in small clothes, with knee and shoe buckles, and three-cornered hat lying nearby—objects of interest to the young.” “He sat there as sometimes stands a solitary, aged oak, surrounded by the younger growth of a later period. It was to us the last exhibition of the great wigs and cocked hats; it left also impressions of a bygone age long to be remembered.”