connected with the early history of the Nurse house have been alluded to.  It has witnessed an extraordinary variety of the conditions of domestic vicissitude.  Scenes rising before the mind in contemplative retrospection, while gazing upon it, present the extremest contrasts of human experience.  On the evening of the 25th of October, 1678, Mary and Elizabeth Nurse were married.  Such an occurrence was undoubtedly the occasion of the highest joy and gladness in a happy household.  The old mansion shone in light, and echoed voices of cheer.  How altered its aspect!  What darkness and silence brooded over and within it, while those same daughters waited, watched, and listened, through the solemn hours of that night of woe and horror, for the coming of their father, husbands, and brothers, bearing to the home, from which she had been so cruelly torn, the remains of their slaughtered mother!

The subsequent history of the house presents a circumstance of singular interest in connection with our story.  All the members of the three branches of the Putnam family, with the exception of Joseph, seem to have been carried away by the witchcraft delusion, in its early stages, and were more or less active in pushing on the prosecutions.  We have seen how fierce was the maniac testimony of Mrs. Ann Putnam and her daughter against Rebecca Nurse.  The lapse of time, by a Providence that wonderfully works its ends, has repaired the breaches made by folly and wrong.  The descendants of the numerous family of Mrs. Ann Putnam have disappeared from the scene:  none of them bearing the name are in the village.  The descendants of Deacon Edward Putnam have also scattered in emigration to other places.  Nathaniel and John, the heads of the other two branches of the family, although involved in the witchcraft delusion, each signed papers in favor of Rebecca Nurse; their descendants, as well as those of Joseph, are still numerous in the village, hold their old position of respectability and influence, and many of them occupy the lands of their ancestors.  Stephen, the grandson of Nathaniel, married Miriam, the grand-daughter of John.  Their son Phinehas, in 1784, bought the Nurse homestead from Benjamin Nurse, the great-grandson of Rebecca.  Orin Putnam, the great-grandson of Phinehas, to whom the estate descends, married in 1836 the daughter of Allen Nurse, a direct descendant of Rebecca, and placed her at the head of her old ancestral homestead.  The children of that marriage, with their father and grandfather, constitute the family that dwell in and own the venerable mansion.  This singular restoration, suggesting such pleasing sentiments, adds another to the remarkable elements of interest belonging to the history of the Townsend-Bishop House.

The descendants of Francis and Rebecca Nurse are numerous, and have honorably perpetuated the name.  Among them may be mentioned the Rev. Peter Nurse, a graduate of Harvard College in 1802, for some years librarian of that institution, an excellent scholar, and long universally respected as a clergyman; and Amos Nurse, a graduate of the same college in 1812,—­an eminent physician connected with the medical faculty of Bowdoin College, a man of distinguished talent and influence in public affairs, and senator in Congress from the State of Maine.