d him that the stars were falling, but
he refused to get up, thinking it a joke. The butcher of the town,
Abijah Whitney, came out to commence preparations for his morning
rounds, but conceiving that the day of judgment had come, he returned
into the house and gave up business for the day. In the year 1901, I
know of one other person only, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, who witnessed
that exhibition, and it has not been repeated.

During my term with Mr. Heywood, and for many previous years, and for a
short period afterwards, the business of printing standard books,
Bibles, spelling-books and dictionaries had been carried on at
Lunenburg by Col. Edmund Cushing. The books were bound, and then sent
by teams to Boston. The printing was on hand-presses, and upon
stereotype plates. Deacon William Harrington carried on a small
business as a bookbinder, and Messrs. William Greenough & Sons erected
a building on the farm now owned by Mr. Brown on the Lancaster road,
and introduced the business of stereotyping--business then new, I
think. These various industries gave employment of a large number of
workmen, mostly young men. The establishment of Colonel Cushing was
near the store of Heywood, and it was at the bindery that I first saw
Alvah Crocker, afterwards known in the politics of the State, and as
the projector of the Fitchburg railroad. He was a maker of paper at
Fitchburg, and he came with a one-horse wagon to Cushing's place and
carried away the paper shavings produced in the bindery. Crocker was
a lean and awkward man, remarkable for his voice, which could be heard
over the larger part of the village. When in after years we were
associated in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and boarded
at the same hotel, the Hanover House, I was compelled to hear the same
voice in constant advocacy of the Fitchburg railroad project.

Colonel Cushing was one of the foremost men in town, but his
aristocratic ways made him unpopular, and therefore he failed to secure
official recognition. He was the father of Luther S. Cushing, for many
years clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, then
reporter of the decisions of the Supreme Court, afterwards a judge upon
the bench of the Court of Common Pleas, and then the author of
Cushing's Manual. Another of his sons, Edmund Cushing, Jr., was a
member of the Supreme Court of the State of New Hampshire. Of his two
other sons, one was a clergyman, and one a civil enginee