She had seen the career of genial Master Rowlandson, a neighbor’s son, full of naughtiness, fun, and life. While an undergraduate at Harvard College he had written in doggerel what was termed pompously a “scandalous libell,” and he had pinned it on the door of Ipswich Meeting-house, along with the tax-collector’s and road-mender’s notices and the announcement of intending marriages, and the grinning wolves’ heads brought for reward. For this prank he had been soundly whipped by the college president on the College Green; but it did not prevent his graduating with honor at the head of his class. He was valedictorian, class-orator, class-poet—in fact, I may say that he had full honors. (I have to add also that in his case honors were easy; for his class, of the year 1652, had but one graduate, himself.) The gay, mischievous boy had become a faithful, zealous, noble preacher to the Puritan church in the neighboring town of Lancaster; and in one cruel night, in 1676, his home was destroyed, the whole town made desolate, his parishioners slaughtered, and his wife, Esther Rowlandson, carried off by the savage red-men, from whom she was bravely rescued by my far-off grandfather, John Hoar. Read the thrilling story of her “captivation” and rescue, and then think of Madam Symonds’s finery in her gilt trunk in the near-by town. For four years the valley of the Nashua—blood-stained, fire-blackened—lay desolate and unsettled before Madam Symonds’s eyes; then settlers slowly crept in. But for fifty years Ipswich was not deemed a safe home nor free from dread of cruel Indians; “Lovewell’s War” dragged on in 1726. But mantuas and masks, whisks and drolls, were just as eagerly sought by the governor’s wife as if Esther Rowlandson’s capture had been a dream.