s, which believed in "endless consequences," but not in "endless
punishment." Later the family evolved into Unitarians by the easy
process of natural selection. The father said grace, and the mother led
in family prayers. She had ideas of her own and expressed them.

The family took the Boston "Weekly Congregationalist" and the Bedford
"Weekly Standard." In the household there was a bookcase of nearly a
hundred volumes. It was the most complete library in town, with the
exception of that of the minister.

The house where H. H. Rogers was born still stands. Its frame was made
in Sixteen Hundred Ninety--mortised, tenoned and pinned. In the garret
the rafters show the loving marks of the broadax--to swing which musical
instrument with grace and effectiveness is now a lost art.

How short is the life of man! Here a babe was born, who lived his
infancy, youth, manhood; who achieved as one in a million; who died: yet
the house of his birth--old at the time--still stubbornly stands as if
to make mock of our ambitions. A hundred years ago Fairhaven had a dozen
men or more who, with an auger, an adz, a broadax and a drawshave,
could build a boat or a house warranted to outlast the owner.

I had tea in this house where H. H. Rogers was born and where his
boyhood days were spent. I fetched an armful of wood for the housewife,
and would have brought a bucket of water for her from the pump, only the
pump is now out of commission, having been replaced by the newfangled
waterworks presented to the town by a Standard Oil magnate. Here Henry
Rogers brought chips in a wheelbarrow from the shipyard on baking-days;
here he hoed the garden and helped his mother fasten up the flaming,
flaring hollyhocks against the house with strips of old sailcloth and
tacks.

There were errands to look after, and usually a pig, and sometimes two,
that accumulated adipose on purslane and lamb's-quarters, with surplus
clams for dessert, also quahaugs to preserve the poetic unities. Then
there came a time when the family kept a cow, which was pastured on the
common, the herd being looked after by a man who had fought valiantly in
the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve, and who used to tell the boys about
it, fighting the battles over with crutch and cane.

In the Winter the ice sometimes froze solid clean across Buzzards Bay.
The active and hustling boys had skates made by the village blacksmith.
Henry Rogers had two pair, and used to loan one pair out for t