Benjamin Cutter, William R. Cutter, History of the town of Arlington, Massachusetts, ormerly the second precinct in Cambridge, or District of Menotomy, afterward the town of West Cambridge. 1635-1879 with a genealogical register of the inhabitants of the precinct.

[148] figures, indicating the proper point of entrance for each joist or beam to the place which should make all parts of the frame come to be properly adjusted. The old house stood at least one hundred and thirty years before it came to be shot at by the armies of the mother country, which, having planted the colony of pilgrims in this wilderness by oppression, claimed the right to enslave their posterity; and the same old mansion, after such a riddling, has stood seventy-one years longer (from 1775 to 1846), to be mutilated for the benefit of a business which has been created by the application of steam, and never dreamed of by at least half a dozen generations who were born and lived under its roof.

The generations succeeding each other on this spot were agricultural men, all of whom from the first have been taught to labor with their own hands. Hosts of men and women, with their descendants, have gone forth from those who first settled West Cambridge, and have carried their habits of industry and thrift elsewhere. All the States of New England and other States of the Union have received representatives from this people. But a fact exists in relation to those who remain, which is remarkable—much of the land continues in the ownership of the same families and names as the original occupants. The son has succeeded the father in the same calling.

They have never been a people to be carried away by any enthusiastic wildness or uncommon revival of religion; yet their present condition is one of that moral excellence which is rarely exceeded in the imperfections of human nature. These people, from their position, have always labored more hours than the people farther in the country. who would not think of rising at two o'clock in the morning to supply milk, vegetables, meal or meat for the daily food of the people of a city half a dozen miles distant. If there has been any fault in former years, it was that the education of hard work in early youth left too little time for the improvement in the more scholastic accomplishments and familiarity with the fashionable literature of the day. The wealth of this farmer community is now such that salaried instructors of both sexes are engaged the year round to teach the rising generations of all classes and conditions gratuitously in whatever may be useful to qualify them in the pursuits of life. The genteel high living of the wealthy in the cities is certainly not more desirable than that of these sons and daughters. who have all the means for human enjoyment that humanity ought to crave.

In this length of time family names have become so interwoven by marriage, that the permanent inhabitants of the place are nearly all of blood relation, in a nearer or more remote line of consanguinity. What has been remarkable also in some of these families, is their great longevity.

Of the West Cambridge long-lived races, we think something has been due as well to their uniform living, as to the more healthy occupation of working farmers, which all the generations for the two centuries have pursued. We believe the agricultural calling to be that which the God of nature designed for man; and in the pursuit