Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[19] to the time of the Revolution. We knew the tradition of Andrew Belcher's stately funeral in 1717, when ninety-six pairs of mourning gloves were issued and fifty suits of mourning clothes were made for guests at the cost of the estate. We knew the place where two negroes were legally put to death in 1755 for the crime of petty treason in murdering their master, the one being hanged, the other burned to death. We knew that two of the regicides took refuge in Cambridge after the death of Charles I., and it was preserved in our memories through a curious oath “By Goffe-Whalley” then extant among Cambridge boys, but now vanished. We knew the spot where stood the oak tree, on the north side of the common, where the Rev. John Wilson, first minister of Boston and a portly man, climbed the tree on Election Day, in 1637, and exhorted the people to vote for Governor Winthrop and not for Harry Vane. We read in a book by a Cambridge woman, Mrs. Hannah Winthrop, “the horrors of that midnight cry,” as she calls it, when all the women and children of Cambridge were awakened by drums and bells on