The Indenture is written in a clear, round, mercantile hand,--evidently Mr. Hancock's own, but his _best_, by comparison with the letter-book,--the leading words of the principal paragraphs being garnished with masterly flourishes, and the top of the paper "indented" by cutting with a knife so as to fit or "tally," after the fashion of those days, with the corresponding copy delivered to Johnson. It has been indorsed and filed away with evident care, and is consequently now in a state of absolute and perfect preservation. With the exception, however, of that little matter of the _store-pay_, and of the wording of the date of its execution, which is given as the "Tenth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Second, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c.," the document differs but little in its phraseology--so conservative is the letter of the law of real estate--from those in use for precisely such contracts in the year 1863. "Thomas Hancock, of Boston in the County of Suffolk and Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, Merchant," as he is named and described in the paper before us, was the founder of the fortunes of the family, and a man of the most considerable note and importance in his day. He was the son of the Reverend Mr. John Hancock, of Lexington, in which town he was born on the 13th of July, 1703. He was sent to Boston early in life to learn the business of a stationer,--with which calling those of bookseller and bookbinder were then combined,--and served his time accordingly with the leading provincial bibliopole of the day, "the enterprising Bookseller Henchman," who died in 1761. Quick, active, thrifty, young Hancock soon made his way in the world,--his famous bookstore in Ann Street was known as the "Stationers' Arms" as early as 1729; the industrious apprentice in due course married his master's fair daughter Lydia; and so our Thomas Hancock went on his way to credit and fortune, and last and best of all to house-building after his own mind, "the comfortablest part of his own life," with strides quite as easy and certain as did his contemporary, the Worshipful Francis Goodchild, Esq., of London,--whose career was, at that very time, so impressing itself upon the notice of that eminent hand, Mr. William Hogarth, of Leicester Fields in the Parish of St. Martin's, as to lead him to depict its events in the remarkable series of prints, "Industry and Idleness," in which they are now handed down for the admiration of posterity. And what the great painter tells us of his hero is equally true of ours,--that, "by taking good courses, and pursuing those points for which he was put apprentice, he became a valuable man, and an ornament to his country."