Dr. Cotton practiced medicine in Plymouth about twenty years, and retired from his profession in 1807. He seems to have inherited the right to hold county offices. His grandfather, Josiah Cotton, was Register of Deeds and County Treasurer from 1713 to 1756; his father, John Cotton, held both offices from 1756 to 1789, and he held the same offices from 1789 to his death, August 12, 1837. His son, Rowland Edwin, continued in the office of Register from 1837 to 1846. Thus the office of Register was held in the family through four generations, one hundred and thirty-three years, and the office of Treasurer through three generations, one hundred and twenty-four years. Dr. Cotton was an antiquarian, and I find on the records many of his memoranda and plans, which aid materially in elucidating matters which without them it would have been difficult to understand. His son, Charles Cotton, graduated at Harvard in 1808, and settled as a physician in Newport, where he married a Miss Northam, and had a family of children, of whom I only remember four, Rossiter, Thomas, Charles and Sophia. He removed to Plymouth in 1831, occupying the house under consideration, where he practised until his father’s death in 1837, when he returned to Newport, where he died. The three boys attended the high school with me, and must have been all within two years of my age. I remember two incidents of our school days, with which they are associated. I have referred in a former chapter to the rule, while Mr. William H. Lord was the teacher, for each boy to repeat at the opening of the school in the morning a verse from the bible. One day Rossiter received a flogging for some offense, and the next morning he repeated in his turn, “For whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.” The other incident occurred while Mr. Isaac N. Stoddard was teacher. Dr. Cotton thought his son Charles had been either unjustly or too severely whipped, so arming himself with a whip he went to Mrs. Nicolson’s hotel where Mr. Stoddard boarded, with the intention of flogging him. But he reckoned without his host, and when he raised his whip, Mr. Stoddard, seizing him by the collar, laid him on the floor, and taking his whip away sent him home.