During these sixty-eight years, great changes have come upon the little village of Gloucester, now grown to a city of more than twenty thousand people; its houses, then few and rude, have increased in number till the rocky hills are covered almost to their summits with the neat dwellings of its still hardy and adventurous population. The old wind-mill, from whose vicinity our friends saw the monster snake, has given way to a summer hotel, whose occupants look out upon the beautiful bay and watch the incoming and outgoing of the fishing fleet of five hundred staunch schooners, manned by the bold mariners who seek their prey on "Georges," the Grand Banks, or the far waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; while the old fort, which never succumbed to a foe, has given way to the invasion of industry, till its grounds are covered and its walls obscured by buildings intended for occupation or labor. And what during these sixty-eight years has befallen the enormous reptile, whose visit to Cape Ann called our friends to examine for themselves his claim to be the real Sea Serpent? In what waters plays the sportive monster to-day? Did he return to the coast of Norway, where, according to the naturalists of the country, such as he live at the bottom of the sea, rising sometimes to the surface in summer, but plunging again as soon as the wind raises the least wave? Or did the bullet of Matthew Gaffney inflict a wound of which he afterwards perished in some submarine retreat? The most cautious naturalists, while endeavoring to explain on various hypotheses the authentic appearances of marine monsters resembling serpents,--one theory being that they are abnormal cases of unusual growth of ordinary marine animals, and another that they are individuals of an almost extinct race,--are compelled to admit that the time may come when, with further evidence, scientific examination will accurately determine the question, and the Sea Serpent take its place among the acknowledged dwellers in the sea. ATTLEBORO, MASS. BY C. M. BARROWS. When the Puritans removed from Charlestown to Trimountain in search of wholesome water-springs they found the ground preoccupied by Motley's "Hermit of Shawmut;" and when the godly people who discarded the musical Wannamoisett and gave their plantation a homely Bible name, joined to their borders the tract of wilderness lying between them and the Bay line, they found the same whimsical anchoret snugly domiciled in his "Study Hall" beside a stream that bounded their new possessions. Thus it happened that the first English inhabitant of Boston and the pioneer settler in the wilds of Rehoboth North Purchase were one and the same person.