when a lad of fourteen, and in the fifty-two years that remained to him his fasts were more than four hundred and fifty. Sometimes they numbered ten a week. Often they lasted three days. On all such occasions he would lie face downward on his study-floor, fasting, weeping, praying, calling on the name of God. By the time he was forty, even such mortification was not enough for him, and he began to keep vigils; then he would leave his bed at the dead of night, fall prostrate on the floor of his library, and spend the hours of darkness "wrestling with God" and getting "unutterable communications from Heaven." The simplest act of life was to Mather an occasion for religious meditation. When he mended his fire he . remembered that godliness should flame up within him. When he washed his hands he recalled that a pure heart was also required of the citizen of Zion. When he pared his nails he reflected on the duty of putting away all superfluity of naughtiness. If a tall man passed him on the street he would exclaim, "Lord, give that man high attainments in Christianity." When he saw a lame man he would say, "Lord, help him to walk uprightly." In early life Mather stuttered and stammered, and spoke with difficulty. Thinking himself unfit to serve the Lord, he began to fit himself

to serve man, and studied medicine. But an old schoolmaster cured him of stuttering; he began to preach, and is now remembered for the support he gave to inoculation, to the witchcraft delusion of 1692, and to the censorship of the press James Franklin and his apprentice Benjamin did so much to destroy.

It was in 1718, when he had just turned twelve, that Benjamin was bound to his brother, who a year later began to print the second newspaper in America. Not many years ago the historian of the town of Salem, while rummaging among the records of the Colonial State Paper Office at London, brought to light a small four-page sheet entitled "Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick." The date was Thursday, September 25, 1690; the size of each page was seven inches by eleven, and one of the four was blank. The purpose of "Publick Occurrences" was praiseworthy. He wished, the printer declared, to do "something towards the curing, or at least the charming, of the spirit of lying;" and he should, he promised, put forth an issue once each month, unless a "glut of occurrences required it oftener. Four days later the General Court decided that " Publick Occurrences was a pamphlet, that it contained reflections of a high nature, that it was printed contrary to

law, and that henceforth nothing should come from the press till a license had first been obtained. None was ever issued for the offending pamphlet, and, save that at London, no copy of it has since been seen.

"Publick Occurrences" is commonly believed to have been the first newspaper in our country. It might more truly be called the first magazine, for it was, as the General Court declared, a pamphlet. The true newspaper did not appear for fourteen years, and was then begun by the Boston postmaster. The duties of his place were far from exacting. If he opened his office on Monday of each week from seven to twelve for the distribution of letters the riders brought in, and again from two to seven for the reception of letters the riders were to take out, collected postage once a quarter, made a list of letters not called for, and higgled with ship-captains for distributing letters they ought to have lodged with him, he did all he was required to do.

To John Campbell, however, these duties were not enough, and to them he added those of a gatherer of news. He visited every stranger that came to town, boarded every ship that entered the bay, collected what scraps of news he could, and wrote them out in a fair hand for the public good. Copies of his "News Letter"

passed from hand to hand at the Coffee House, found their way to the neighboring towns, and went out in the mail to the governors of the New England colonies. As time passed, the glut of occurrences steadily increased; his work grew daily more in favor; and he was at last compelled to lay down the pen, betake himself to type, and become the founder of the Ameri can newspaper. Monday, the seventeenth of April, 1704, was a white day in the annals of Boston, and as the printer struck off the first copy of the first number of the "Boston News Letter," Chief Justice Sewell, who stood by, seized the paper and bore it, damp from the press, to the President of Harvard College. Some extracts from the "Flying Post" concerning the Pretender, the text of a sermon licensed to be printed, notices of a couple of arrivals, of a couple of deaths, of the appointment of an admiralty judge and deputy, and a call for business, is all it contains.

During fifteen years the "News Letter' had no rival. But in 1719 Campbell lost the post-office, refused in revenge to have his newspapers carried by the riders, and the new postmaster at once established the "Boston Gazette," and gave the matter to James Franklin to print. While engaged in setting type and mixing ink in his brother's office, Benjamin

began to write. His first attempts were two ballads in doggerel verse, treating of subjects which at that time filled the popular mind. The keeper of the Boston light had been drowned in a storm. A pirate renowned along the whole coast had been killed.

There is not now living a man who has ever beheld such a rover out of the China seas. Early in the eighteenth century the black flag had been seen by scores of captains who went in and out of the colonial ports. From the West Indies, from New Providence, from the sounds and inlets of the Virginia coast, from Cape Fear River, from Pamlico Sound, from the very shores of Massachusetts, freebooter after freebooter sallied forth to plunder and destroy. When Captain Kidd died in 1700, Quelch succeeded him, and long found shelter in the bays and harbors of New England. In one of them, on a return from a prosperous coasting trip, the people surprised him, and hanged him with six companions on the banks of Charles River, June 30, 1704. The event is memorable as it became the occasion of the

first piece of newspaper reporting in America. In the crowd that stood about the gallows-tree that day in June was John Campbell, who, in the next number of the "News Letter," described the scene, "the exhortation to the mal