The children of Weymouth, during the present century, have gone forth in peace and in war, and are now scattered all over the common country, and, indeed, over the civilized world. Her children, too, remaining at home, have altered and diversified the old town until the fathers would know it no longer. It must be for others to recount these changes of the later years. I prefer to leave the narrative on the threshold of the new era and before the old order of things had yet begun to pass away,--while a fresher and a purer air still hung around the Great Hill, and while a certain fragrance of the primeval forest gathered about Whitman’s pond. I prefer to leave it while Joshua Bates, newly come back from the continental army, a colonel of artillery at twenty-eight, was meditating those busy enterprises which were destined to infuse a new life into his native town; and I shall not seek to follow that other Joshua Bates, then unborn, whose destiny it was to migrate back to the mother country, and there in fullness of time to die at the head of the first commercial firm of London or the world. We leave Weymouth just emerging, weak but alive yet, from the long ordeal of an eight years’ war, and entering on a more prosperous career; we leave it while brave old Brigadier Lovell yet viewed his broad acres from the summit of King-Oak Hill,--while Dr. Cotton Tufts still served the town whether at the bedsides of the sick or in the councils of the State, and ere yet the grass had grown over the new-made grave of the good old Parson Smith. Two centuries and a half of municipal life are now completed, and in celebrating the event of to-day may we not fitly close with the earnest hope that the succeeding years may be as blessed as those which are past,--that unity, virtue and good-will may long find their abode within the limits of the ancient town, and that, even more in the future than in the past, “may peace be within thy walls and prosperity within thy palaces.” FOOTNOTES: [1] Winslow’s Good Newes; Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 291. [2] Phinehas Pratt’s Narrative; IV. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., v. 4, p. 478. [3] Pratt’s Narrative; IV. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., v. 4, pp. 478, 487. [4] Bradford; IV. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., v. 3, p. 107. [5] Levett’s Voyage; III. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., v. 8, p. 190.