improbable that his pen was put in requisition.  Sergeant Thomas Putnam, the parish recorder, as he was sometimes entitled, was a good writer.  His chirography, although not handsome, is singularly uniform, full, open, and clear, so easily legible that it is a refreshment to meet with it; and his sentences are well-constructed, simple, condensed, and to the purpose.  His words do their office in conveying his meaning.  No public body ever had a better clerk.  Somehow or other, he and others, brought up in the woods, had contrived to acquire considerable efficiency in the use of the pen.  Perhaps, a few who, like him, had parents able to afford it, had been sent to Ipswich or Charlestown to enjoy the privilege of what Cotton Mather calls “the Cheverian education.”

The southern boundary of the village was intended to run due west from the Ipswich road to Lynn, and was accordingly spoken of as “on a west line.”  As originally established, it was defined by an enumeration of a variety of objects such as trees of different kinds and sizes, as running through the lands of John Felton, Nathaniel Putnam, and Anthony Needham, to “a dry stump standing at the corner of Widow Pope’s cow-pen, leaving her house and the saw-mill within the farmer’s range,” and so on to “the top of the hill by the highway side near Berry Pond.”  From the changeable conditions of some of the objects, and a diversity of methods adopted by surveyors,—­many of them being unacquainted with, or making no allowance for, the variation of the compass,—­controversies arose with the mother-town:  and some proprietors, like the Gardners, were left in doubt how the line affected them; and there was, in consequence, much disquietude.  The line was not accurately run until 1700.

It is observable, that the “saw-mill” is still in operation on the same spot.  The “cow-pen,” then on the south side of the mill, was, more than a century ago, removed to the north side, where it has remained ever since.  This estate has interesting reminiscences.  It was an original grant in January, 1640, to Edward Norris, at the time of his settlement as pastor of the First Church in Salem.  He sold to Eleanor Trussler in 1654.  It then went into the possession of Henry Phelps, who sold to Joseph Pope in 1664.  His widow, Gertrude, owned it in 1672.  In 1793, Eleazer Pope sold to Nathaniel Ropes, son of Judge Ropes, of Salem.  His heirs sold it back to the Phelpses; and it is now in the possession of the Rev. Willard Spaulding, of Salem.  Originally given as an ordination present to a minister of the old town, it has, after the lapse of two hundred and twenty-six years, come round into the hands of another.  The house in which the Popes lived one hundred and twenty-nine years, and the families that succeeded them for above half a century more,—­a venerable and picturesque specimen of the rural architecture, in its best form, of the earliest times,—­has, within the last ten years, given place to a new one on the same spot.  In that old house, besides unnumbered and unknown instances of the same sort, Israel Putnam conducted his courtship; and there, on the 19th of July, 1739, he was married to Hannah, daughter of Joseph Pope.