Full in sight of the spot where we are now gathered,--almost at the foot of King-Oak Hill,--stands that portion of the ancient town of Weymouth, known from time immemorial as the village of Old Spain. When or why it was first so called is wholly unknown,--scarcely a tradition even remains to suggest to us an origin of the name. None the less Old Spain well deserved a portion at least of that familiar title, for, next to the town of Plymouth, it is the oldest settlement in Massachusetts. And when we speak of the oldest settlements in Massachusetts, we speak of communities which may fairly lay claim to a very respectable degree of antiquity; not of the greatest, it is true, for all antiquity is relative, and that of America scarcely deserves the name by the side of what England has to show; but what is the antiquity of England compared with that of Rome?--and Rome, again, seems young and crude when we speak of Greece; while even those who fought upon the ringing plains of windy Troy are but as prattling children in presence of the hoary age of the Pharaohs. The settlement of Old Spain and of Weymouth is, therefore, ancient only as things American are ancient; but still two hundred and fifty years of time carry us back to events and men which seem sufficiently remote. When the first European made his home in Old Spain,--when the earliest rude hut was framed on yonder north shore of Phillips Creek,--the modern world in which we live was just assuming shape. Few now realize how little of that which makes up the vast accumulated store of human possessions which we have inherited from our fathers--which to us is as the air we breathe,--had then existence. The Reformation was then young,--Luther and Calvin and Erasmus were men of yesterday; the life-and-death struggle with Catholicism still tortured eastern Europe. The thirty years’ war in Germany was just commenced, and the youthful Gustavus Adolphus had yet to win his spurs. The blood of St. Bartholomew was but half a century old, and the murder of Henry IV. was as near to the men of 1622 as is that of Abraham Lincoln to us. The great Cardinal-Duke was then organizing modern France; Charles I. had not yet ascended the English throne; Hampden was a young country gentleman, and Oliver Cromwell an unpretending English squire. While men still believed that the sun moved round the earth, Galileo and Kepler were gradually ascertaining those laws which guide the planets in their paths; Bacon was meditating his philosophy; Don Quixote was a newly published work, with a local reputation; and Milton, not yet a Cambridge pensioner, was making his first essays at verse. Shakespeare had died but six years before, and, indeed, the first edition of his plays did not appear until the very year in which Weymouth was settled. Thus, in 1622, our world of literature, of science, almost of history, was yet to be created. Hardly a single volume of our current English