The Story of Massachusetts Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. THE FIIJST WINTER. OF all lotteries, the risks are the most terrible in that where one chooses a new home ; worst of all, probably, when he chan... more »ges from continent to continent in the choosing. When Winthrop and his friends had fairly surveyed the scene of their new empire, there must, even to the most philosophical, have been a disappointment. The pastures around Salem are now much what they were then. An ungracious granite protrudes from the scanty soil, in knolls, without even much picturesqueness, and promises no crops beyond that of lichens. Winthrop notes in his journal that they were regaled with strawberries on landing; and they were born into their new life with all the glories of June. But they were not satisfied with Naumkeag or Salem for the capital seat of their settlement, and pushed up the Bay to see the mouth of Charles River and of Mystic River. At Charlestown there was a settlement of nine persons, who had joined Walford the smith, who once held that peninsula alone; and here they brought the ships as they arrived in successive weeks, and to this place they transferred the stores which had been discharged at Salem. The number of emigrants who arrived in seventeen vessels this summer was not quite one thousand. Of these nearly one hundred returned in the ships. They lost time in the first summer by a doubt as to the place of the capital. The first intention was to place it three leagues up Charles River, or, as Fuller says, at the " head of the river." By any reasonable measurement this would bring it to the mouth of Stony Brook in Waltham. And since Mr. Horsford found there what may be thought a ditch for a palisade, Mr. Winsor has suggested that possibly this spot was, at one moment, selected for the capital. But it is hard to say why No...« less