On the south side of Court square on the corner of School street, there lived until 1839 a worthy old man, who for some years was stone blind. He was Joseph Barnes, the great-grandfather of our townsman, bearing the same name. He carried, extended out in front of him, a staff about eight feet long, with which he tapped the sidewalk constantly, and directed his steps without any other guide or support. It was his privilege to live in days when bicycles, automobiles and trolley cars had not been invented to endanger the lives of even the far-seeing and wary. As I remember him he walked alone through the various streets of the town, and if occasional aid became necessary in avoiding some new obstruction, both old and young were ready to lend it. His wife kept a little candy shop, if so it may be called, in the front room on the east side of the front door, and there children who thought it too far to go to Nancy and Eliza’s shop on Market street, patronized her. It was a queer kind of a shop, showing as its only furniture a bed and chairs, and looking glass and table. Under the bed three or four spice boxes were placed in a row, containing in tempting neatness assortments of candy comprising the usual twisted parti-colored sticks, and kisses and Salem Gibraltars. How these last received their name, and why their manufacture should have been confined to Salem, I never knew, but there they were made, and there they are made today, and if any of my young readers never saw them, they had better induce their grocer to send for some and keep them in stock. Their makers are welcome to this gratuitous advertisement. Mr. Barnes died January 28, 1839, and the house in which he lived was occupied some years by Nathaniel Cobb Lanman, and finally removed to Lothrop street, when Court square was widened in 1857. CHAPTER XXVII. Through all my boyhood Nathaniel Morton Davis occupied the house on Court street, now owned by the Old Colony Club, except for a year, when, while repairing the house, he occupied for a year or more the house on Leyden street, which his mother had occupied before her removal to Boston. The house at that time had its front door on the southerly side where an arch may now be seen in the front hall. On the west side of the front door there was a good sized parlor, which reached within about three feet of the street. What is now the library, lapped far enough by the above parlor to admit of a door from one to the other, and was the law office of Mr. Davis, with an outside entrance north of the parlor above mentioned.