sis. His reading of hymn and Scriptures was a remembrance to be treasured, his presence in the pulpit a benediction, and who that had seen him there could forget the shining glory of his face as he "talked with God." For the children of his parish, through a long season, he made Saul of Tarsus a living personality, and the coasts of the Mediterranean as familiar to them as Cape Cod Bay. He illustrated his instruction by crayon sketches in color, and the scholars saw how Gamaliel's pupils were grouped about their master's feet; they knew how a man should adjust his phylactery; and though there were derision of the High Priest's countenance, there was no confusing the style of his breast-plate with that of a centurion. As he aged, the good pastor became something of a recluse. He loved his books, and through the years amassed in his little study a collection that was typical of the best in his day and generation, with a queer alien blot now and then: for it was said that he could never resist the blandishments of the canvasser and the appeal of the book in his hand. Dying, he left his treasure intact to the village library; nor did he see the necessity for any such stipulation as old John Lothrop's that his books were only for those who knew how to use them.

The temporal affairs of these good men not infrequently needed mending, nor, as time went on, were the clergy usually recruited from among the natives: Cape Cod men, pursuing their vocations by land and sea, were likely to depute to aliens the less lucrative cure of souls. Versatile Mr. Avery, of Truro, seems to

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have come out well in the struggle and to have bequeathed a tidy fortune to his heirs. But Jonathan Russell and Timothy Alden, as we have seen, needed to have a care to their firewood; and Oakes Shaw, the successor of Russell and father of the great chief justice, even had recourse to the constable to adjust the arrears of his stipend. Mrs. Shaw, debating with her son his choice of a profession, was betrayed into some ironical appreciation of the clergy which she was quick to regret. "I hope you will not mistake your talent," wrote she. "I could name several that took upon them the sacred profession of divinity, this profession so far from regulating their conduct, that their conduct would have disgraced a Hottentot. Others we have seen in various professions who have been an ornament to the Christian religion. I was not aware till I had just finished the last sentence that you might construe it into a discouragement of entering upon the study of divinity. This is not my intention, for I do most sincerely hope that you will make it your study through life whether you ever preach it or not.'

Her son chose the law, and gave us one of the two great men, both of them lawyers, whom the Cape has produced. Palfrey quotes one who went so far as to affirm that "no spot has made such a gift to the country as Great Marshes in Barnstable." There lived James Otis, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in the troubled times of the Revolution, and there James Otis the patriot was born. James Otis, the younger, when he grew to maturity, removed to Bos

ton, but he may be counted a son of the Old Colony and an inheritor of its genius. He was far more than a fiery orator whose eloquence was the inspiration of other men's work; but on a flood of enthusiasm induced by that eloquence he was carried into the House of Representatives. "Out of this election will arise a damned faction," commented a royalist judge, "which will shake this province to its foundation." His prediction fell ludicrously short of the event. Otis conducted the patriots' cause with such "prudence and fortitude, at every sacrifice of personal interest and amidst unceasing persecution," that the "History of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts" can declare that: "Constitutional government in America, so far as it is expressed in writing, developed largely from the ideas expressed by James Otis and the Massachusetts men who framed the Constitution of 1780."

And the man who more than any other in Massachusetts was to perfect their work, who stands beside the great Marshall in the history of American jurisprudence, and by the wise decisions of a temperate mind established the flow of justice through the channel of the common law, was also a native of Great Marshes. There, in 1781, when the work of the earlier patriots was accomplished, Lemuel Shaw was born. Slowly, irresistibly, by sheer force of worth and capacity, he advanced to fame. He was graduated from Harvard, he entered the law, and for twenty-six years practised his profession in Boston. At one time and another he served in the General Court, he was fire

warden, selectman, a member of the school committee, and of the constitutional convention of 1820; and in 1830, when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, his sane inheritance, his tempered judgment, his wide experience of law and of men, had forged a mind perfectly adapted to his opportunity. In his thirty years upon the bench he enriched incalculably the sparse records of the common law. In the opinion of a fellow jurist, "The distinguishing characteristic of his judicial work was the application of the general principles of law, by a virile and learned mind, with a statesman's breadth of vision and amplitude of wisdom to the novel conditions presented by a rapidly changing civilization." The Pilgrims had brought here and practised the AngloSaxon conception of such freedom as is commensurate with justice to all. "They brought along with them their national genius," wrote Saint John de Crèvecœur in his "Letters from an American Farmer," in 1782, "to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess." It was the great American jurists who developed and adapted that conception of justice for the due guidance of the new nation.

Shaw lived in Boston, but, unlike James Otis, he never gave up his hold upon his native town. He loved the village roads and Great Marshes and the sea. And, curiously, as if again the magic of the sea's charm persisted in the fortunes of its children, Shaw's daughter married Herman Melville, the author of "Typee" and "Omoo." Shaw was fond of children,

and used to drive his little granddaughter about Boston in his old chaise; there is a story of his being caught by a visitor at a game of bear with the children. But he could be stern enough on the bench; and a sharp practitioner, complaining of his severity, was tartly reminded by a fellow lawyer that "while we have jackals and hyenas at the bar, we want the old lion on the bench with one blow of his huge paw to bring their scalps about their eyes."

Shaw spoke again and again at local celebrations on the Cape. At one such banquet he might have proposed, or answered, the toast to "Cape Cod Our Home: The first to honor the Pilgrim ship, the first to receive the Pilgrim feet; the first and always the dearest in the memory of her children everywhere.” But it was at Yarmouth that he expressed best, perhaps, the loyalties of his great heart: "There is not one visitor here male or female whose heart is not penetrated with the deep and endearing sentiment, at once joyous and sad, which makes up the indescribable charm of home."