more than home and dearer than life.  Nor was this “vast extent of wilderness” to which they succeeded by right of purchase from the heirs of Chickatabat any such narrow area as that of the same name, recently annexed to the city of Boston.  It extended from what is now the northern limit of South Boston to within a hundred and sixty rods of the Rhode Island line, thus giving the township a length of about thirty-five miles “as y’e road goethe.”  The late Ellis Ames, of Canton, a competent authority, says the town “was formerly bounded by Boston, Roxbury, Dedham, Wrentham, Taunton, Bridgewater and Braintree,” so that its history is the history of a large part of the towns in Norfolk county and a portion of Bristol.  The manner in which the original territory has been gradually reduced is thus told by Mr. Ames:  “Milton was set off in 1662; part of Wrentham, in 1724:  Stoughton, in 1726; Sharon, in 1765; Foxborough, in 1778; Canton, in 1797; strips were also set off to Dedham, probably, in 1739; and before the whole was annexed, portions of the northern part of the town were set off to Boston, at two several times:  in 1804 and in 1855.”  Since that date another portion has been severed to make the northern quarter of Hyde Park.  Honorable John Daggett, the historian of Attleborough, which was then a part of the Rehoboth North Purchase, says there was a dispute concerning the boundary between Dorchester and that town, which was finally settled by a conference of delegates, held at the house of one of his ancestors.

Why those “most Godly and Religious People” chose to settle where they did rather than on the Charles river, as at first intended, Mr. Blake proceeds to tell us in his annals.  He says they made the voyage from England to New England in a vessel of four hundred tons, commanded by Captain Squeb, and that they had “preaching or expounding of the Scriptures every day of their passage, performed by Ministers.”  Contrary to their desires, the ship discharged them and their goods at Nantasket, but they procured a boat in which part of the company rowed into Boston harbor and up the Charles river, “until it became narrow and shallow,” when they went ashore at a point in the present village of Watertown.  But after exploring the open lands about Boston, they finally made choice of a neck of land “joyning to a place called by y’e Indians Mattapan,” because it formed a natural inclosure for the cattle they had brought with them, and which, if turned into the open land, would be liable to stray and be lost.  This little circumstance fixed the original settlement on the marsh now known as Dorchester Neck.