Of Blackstone’s personal history Nathan afterward read them this note, by Mr. Charles F. Adams:
“He was in no respect an ordinary man. His presence in the peninsula of Shawmut, in 1630, was made additionally inexplicable from the fact that he was about the last person one would ever have expected to find there. He was not a fisherman, nor a trader, nor a refugee: he was a student, an observer, and a recluse. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he had received Episcopal ordination in England. In 1630 he was in his thirty-fifth year. All this is extremely suggestive, for it goes to make of him exactly the description of man who would naturally be found in company with the scholarly and unobtrusive Morell. Further, the probabilities would strongly point to him as Winthrop’s authority where Winthrop, in 1631, speaks of a species of weather record going back seven years since this bay was planted by Englishmen.”
As the various travelers told their times that evening, a certain plan was laid out for the next day, in which the two ladies agreed to join. And it was finally agreed that they should lunch down town with the gentlemen, and should take the elevator at the “Equitable” Insurance Company, so that the two mothers might have something to substitute for the view the children had had from the State House.
This plan may be recommended to lady travelers. The view is not as sweeping on the west as that from the State House. But, on other sides, it is equally satisfactory. And you can go up by steam—a great matter when you have passed forty years.
But before lunch Nathan took them to the head of State Street, to the “Old State House.”
“This,” said he, “is what the Philadelphia girl called the State Street Meeting House.”
He had brought them in in a Norfolk horse car, so that they saw the building from the southern side. The lion on one side and the unicorn on the other dance on their hind legs at the top, with the roof to part them. Nathan was careful to show John and the rest that as they looked up on the beasts they stood themselves on the very ground of the “Boston Massacre” of March 5, 1770. The English troops were in a little semi-circle on the north side of the street. Attuchs, the mulatto, and the rest of the mob who stoned the troops and snowballed them were in the street, or on the southern side. There were then no sidewalks.