Yet the Warwick of to-day, in its summer dress, well repays the visitor who may chance upon its hospitable soil. All along its beautiful shores arise pleasant homes and hostelries for the accommodation of the summer visitor; while inland, the rolling hills, prosperous with growing grass and coming harvests, are not without a quiet and restful beauty which pleases the eye, and solaces the mind and heart. In the little hamlet of Apponaug, close by Coweset Bay, the brave new Town Hall, one of the finest in New England, testifies to the enterprise as well as to the prosperity of the people. Its newness is in harmonious touch with the prevalent appearance of the country around it. There is nothing old, apparently, in old Warwick but the sub-soil and rocks, and here and there a venerable tree antedating European occupation, beneath the branches of which Pomham and Soccononocco, with their dusky braves, may have sat and smoked the pipe of peace with the men of Massachusetts, or taken counsel as to the best means of circumventing the united wiles of the head-sachem of the Narragansetts, Miantonomi, and his persistent allies, the pale-faced “Gortonoges.” Yet old Warwick has a history surpassed in interest by none other of the New England settlements. Its founder was a man of intellectual and moral force, worthy to rank with Roger Williams, William Bradford, and the other noble founders of our liberties. He was a man much misrepresented in his day and generation, and but little remembered and understood even in our own time, when history is being studied anew in the light of evolution and a true historical method, and reconstructed on the principles of enlightened scholarship and impartial justice. The later history of Warwick also has much of interest for the patriotic American. On its shores the first blow of our Revolutionary struggle was struck, in the capture and destruction of the British schooner Gaspee; while the heights of Warwick Neck were then crowned with a fort, long since dismantled, for the protection of the settlements around Coweset Bay from the attacks of the English. It is the Warwick of the seventeenth century, not that of the eighteenth or nineteenth, that I would fain call to the minds of my readers,—the Warwick whose inland acres were covered with the primitive wilderness, where wolves and Indians were at home,[2] and the white man was a stranger; the Warwick which Samuell Gorton sought after being frozen out of Boston, banished from Plymouth and Pocasset, and driven by contentions from Providence and Pawtuxet.