So far as the houses on the lower half of North street are concerned, several changes have occurred since 1830. In my boyhood the double house now partly occupied by Miss Catherine Kendall, was a single house, occupied by the widow of Edward Taylor, who was then the wife of John Blaney Bates, whom she married in 1807. After the death of Mrs. Bates and her husband, whom I well remember, Jacob and Abner Sylvester Taylor, sons of Mrs. Bates, remodelled the house and divided it into two tenements. John Blaney Bates, the second husband of Mrs. Taylor, was one of the most skilful masons and master builders in southeastern Massachusetts, and was largely engaged in enterprises in other towns. He built the Plymouth Court House in 1820, the Barnstable Court House, and as many as eight or ten brick or stone dwelling houses on Summer street and Winthrop Place in Boston. A contract to build a house of hammered stone for George Bond in Winthrop Place, proved a disastrous one, and terminated his business career. After the failure of Whitwell and Bond, the house referred to was sold to Henry Cabot, the grandfather of Henry Cabot Lodge, and occupied by him until Winthrop Place was extended to Franklin street, and made a part of the present Devonshire street. Mr. Bates, as I remember him, was in his later days an inveterate sportsman, and would often spend hours behind an ice hummock, when the harbor was partially frozen, waiting for a possible shot at ducks in a sheet of open water near by. He died in 1831. His stepsons, the Taylor brothers, who learned their mason’s trade with him, also became skilful workmen and contractors in Plymouth and neighboring towns. In 1824 they built Pilgrim Hall for the Pilgrim Society, and Mr. Taylor told me that when they signed the contract in July, the stone was lying undisturbed in a virgin rock on the easterly side of Queen Ann’s turnpike in Weymouth, and the timber stood uncut in the forests of Maine. So expeditiously, however, was the work performed that the hall was occupied by the Society at the anniversary celebration in the following December.