The temporal affairs of these good men not infrequently needed mending, nor, as time went on, were the clergy usually recruited from among the natives: Cape Cod men, pursuing their vocations by land and sea, were likely to depute to aliens the less lucrative cure of souls. Versatile Mr. Avery, of Truro, seems to have come out well in the struggle and to have bequeathed a tidy fortune to his heirs. But Jonathan Russell and Timothy Alden, as we have seen, needed to have a care to their firewood; and Oakes Shaw, the successor of Russell and father of the great chief justice, even had recourse to the constable to adjust the arrears of his stipend. Mrs. Shaw, debating with her son his choice of a profession, was betrayed into some ironical appreciation of the clergy which she was quick to regret. “I hope you will not mistake your talent,” wrote she. “I could name several that took upon them the sacred profession of divinity, this profession so far from regulating their conduct, that their conduct would have disgraced a Hottentot. Others we have seen in various professions who have been an ornament to the Christian religion. I was not aware till I had just finished the last sentence that you might construe it into a discouragement of entering upon the study of divinity. This is not my intention, for I do most sincerely hope that you will make it your study through life whether you ever preach it or not.” Her son chose the law, and gave us one of the two great men, both of them lawyers, whom the Cape has produced. Palfrey quotes one who went so far as to affirm that “no spot has made such a gift to the country as Great Marshes in Barnstable.” There lived James Otis, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in the troubled times of the Revolution, and there James Otis the patriot was born. James Otis, the younger, when he grew to maturity, removed to Boston, but he may be counted a son of the Old Colony and an inheritor of its genius. He was far more than a fiery orator whose eloquence was the inspiration of other men’s work; but on a flood of enthusiasm induced by that eloquence he was carried into the House of Representatives. “Out of this election will arise a damned faction,” commented a royalist judge, “which will shake this province to its foundation.” His prediction fell ludicrously short of the event. Otis conducted the patriots’ cause with such “prudence and fortitude, at every sacrifice of personal interest and amidst unceasing persecution,” that the “History of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts” can declare that: “Constitutional government in America, so far as it is expressed in writing, developed largely from the ideas expressed by James Otis and the Massachusetts men who framed the Constitution of 1780.”