Before leaving my grandfather’s family I trust that I may be excused for referring to his daughter Betsey, or Elizabeth, as she was called late in life. She was born in the house under discussion, October 28, 1803, and until thirteen years of age attended private schools in Plymouth. After that time for three years, until she was sixteen, she attended the school of Miss Elizabeth Cushing, in the family of Deacon Wm. Cushing of Hingham. Miss Cushing’s school was probably not surpassed by any ladies’ school in the country, and there a solid foundation was laid, which served my aunt so well as the wife of Mr. Bancroft, during his services as minister at London and Berlin. History, geography and public affairs were her special subjects of study, and while in London it was said by Englishmen, that she was so familiar with English politics as to be able to discuss them, and hold her own with the leading statesmen of the Kingdom. To show the extent of her early reading, when a girl, or a young woman, she listened one Sunday to a sermon preached in the Plymouth pulpit by a minister of a Plymouth County town exchanging with Dr. Kendall, which was much admired. It seemed to her that she had read it somewhere, and on going home, succeeded in finding it in a volume of sermons by Rev. Newcome Cappe, an English clergyman, who became pastor of a dissenting congregation in York and served from 1756 to near the end of the century. After looking the sermon over and verifying her suspicions of a wholesale plagiarism, she laid the book down on the centre table with the title in plain sight. In the evening the clergyman called at the house, and during his visit, much to the embarrassment of the hostess, and doubtless to his own bewilderment, sat with the book at his elbow, and the title staring him in the face. I prefer not to mention his name, but my older readers may identify him when I say that invariably when he preached in Plymouth, as he often did, he selected for one of his hymns that from Peale Dabney’s collection, with the familiar verse: “Mark the soft falling snow, And the diffusive rain; To heaven from whence it fell, It turns not back again; But waters earth through every pore, And calls forth all her secret store.” She married in 1825, Alexander Bliss, law partner of Daniel Webster, who died July 15, 1827, and in 1838, married George Bancroft, the historian, who found in her efficient aid in the performance of his duties as secretary of the Navy, under President Polk, as minister to England from 1846 to 1849, and later as minister to Berlin.