The men and women who dwelt in them were in great degree cut off from the whole outer world;--at least we would think so now. The roads were few and bad; the chief one, still known as Queen Ann’s turnpike, is said to have received its name, not from the sovereign of the loyal colonies, but from the hostess of a little “four corner” inn upon it, who was always known by that royal title.[67] Queen Ann’s turnpike was the direct road between Boston and Plymouth, but the time of which I speak was long before the stage-coach era, and the Weymouth man, whom business called to Boston, went by water, or drove or walked there over Milton Hill and Roxbury Neck. Nor was that journey to Boston then devoid of danger. Early in the last century, for instance, it is traditionally stated that a party, including two of the principal citizens of Weymouth, while returning home by water from Boston, were overtaken by a snow-storm and wrecked on one of the islands in the bay; all perished, it is said, save Captain Alexander Nash and a negro servant, through whose devotion his life was saved.[68] If the tradition be true it should be added that Captain Nash’s descendants in the present century have repaid the debt due to their ancestor’s slave by long and eminent services in the emancipation of his race. But the story at least illustrates the distance then existing between Boston and Weymouth,[69]--a distance greater for every practical purpose than that now existing between Weymouth and New York. Between Old Spain and Quincy Point, or Wessagusset and Mount Wollaston as they then were called, a ferry was authorized as early as 1635, and the rate of ferriage was fixed at a penny for each person and at threepence for each horse; two years later this rate was raised and the ferryman of the day was licensed to keep a house of call. But so far as the whole great outer world was concerned, the earlier dwellers in Weymouth were, through four generations, what we should consider as entombed alive. There was no newspaper,--there was no system of public transportation,--there was no regular post,--between the colonies themselves there was little occasion for intercourse, and Europe was months removed. Those freemen who were elected deputies attended the sessions of the General Court; and now and then the clergyman or the magistrate took part in some solemn conclave of his brethren at the capital or in a neighboring town. Of the young men, a few went with the fishing fleet to Cape Sable, or sailed on trading voyages to the West Indies or to Spain, thus catching glimpses of the outer world; but it may well be questioned whether any Weymouth-born woman ever laid eyes on the shores of the mother country during the first hundred and sixty years of the settlement of the town.