These records also reveal to us very clearly what a singularly conservative race our ancestors were,--in this respect how different from their children. They clung very close to authority, to tradition and to precedent. The conditions by which they were surrounded changed but slowly, and they themselves changed more slowly yet. What volumes, for instance, in this respect, are contained in this single fact:--in 1651 the town, in six brief articles, defined the powers of its selectmen, and more than sixty years later, in 1712, I find the following entry in the records: “Voted the Selectmen the same power they had granted in the year 1651.”[78] Again, to cite another example: Weymouth then, as now, had among its citizens a James Humphrey, and, under date of March 12th, 1781, I find this entry: “Voted--That the thanks of the Town be given to the Honᵇˡᵉ James Humphrey Esqʳ. for his faithful services as a selectman in the Town for more than forty years past.” Unlike so many of her sister towns, the Weymouth of to-day has never, even yet, learned enough of the science of true republican government to “rotate” its town officials. When they have had a man who was willing to serve them well and faithfully, they have actually kept him in office. The James Humphrey of the last century served the town “over forty years”; the James Humphrey of this has already served it nearly twenty-five. I do not know if it indeed was so, but to me the very nature of the New England world seems to have been less cheerful in those earlier days than now. Not only was life less joyous, but nature wore a harsher front. I have spoken of the great sickness of 1751, and how it desolated Weymouth; but epidemics seem to have been far more prevalent during the last century than in this. The fearful scourge of the small-pox has left its pit-marks on every page of early New England history, and when, in 1775, a chronic dysentery prevailed to such an extent that three, four and even five children were lost in single families, a Weymouth woman writing from the midst of the general distress could only say “the dread upon the minds of the people of catching the distemper is almost as great as if it were the small-pox.”[79] Yet in 1735 the diphtheria raged, as well as in 1751. Their winters also seem to have been longer, their snows deeper, their frosts more severe than ours. In 1717 there was a great snow-storm, famous in New England annals. The country was buried under huge drifts, which swept over fences and houses, reducing the whole colony to one white, glittering desert. Weymouth disappeared with the rest, and the event was of sufficient importance to cause a memorandum of it to be inserted in the records.[80] In other years we hear of the harbor freezing over in November; and on the 26th of March, 1785, the winter’s snow, though much reduced, lay still on a level with the fences, nor was it till April 7th that the ice broke up in the Fore River.[81] I