erend Mr. Ely, on the Connecticut River, and his kinsman, Doctor
Williams, of Deerfield, at once asserted that he remembered him very
well at all stages of his boyhood.

Governor Charles K. Williams, of Vermont, writing from Rutland under
date February 26, 1853, said of the Reverend Eleazer and his "claims" to
the throne of France, "I never had any doubt that Williams was of Indian
extraction, and a descendant of Eunice Williams. His father and mother
were both of them at my father's house, although I cannot ascertain
definitely the year. I consider the whole story a humbug, and believe
that it will be exploded in the course of a few months." As a matter of
fact, the story has been exploded,--though the features of the Reverend
Eleazer Williams, when in the full flush of manhood, certainly bore a
remarkable resemblance to those of the French kings from whom his
descent was claimed. His mixed blood might account for this, however.
Williams's paternal grandfather was an English physician,--not of the
Deerfield family at all,--and his grandmother the daughter of Eunice
Williams and her redskin mate. His father was Thomas Williams, captain
in the British service during the American Revolution, and his mother a
Frenchwoman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was part English, part Yankee,
part Indian, and part French, a combination sufficiently complex to
account, perhaps, even for an unmistakably Bourbon chin.

NEW ENGLAND'S FIRST "CLUB WOMAN"

Even to-day, in this emancipated twentieth century, women ministers and
"female preachers" are not infrequently held up to derision by those who
delight to sit in the seat of the scornful. Trials for heresy are
likewise still common. It is not at all strange, therefore, that
Mistress Ann Hutchinson should, in 1636, have been driven out of Boston
as an enemy dangerous to public order, her specific offence being that
she maintained in her own house that a mere profession of faith could
not evidence salvation, unless the Spirit first revealed itself from
within.

Mrs. Hutchinson's maiden name was Ann Marbury, and she was the daughter
of a scholar and a theologian--one Francis Marbury--who was first a
minister of Lincolnshire and afterward of London. Naturally, much of the
girl's as well as the greater part of the woman's life was passed in the
society of ministers--men whom she soon learned to esteem more for what
they knew than for what they preached. Theology, indeed, was the
atmos