cy of Great Britain. The fine for
such an offence was ten livres to the king, nine hundred for charitable
objects, three hundred to the palace chapel, one hundred for prisoners,
and five hundred to the mendicant monks. One sea-captain, Brunet, was
accused of having favored the escape of thirty-six young men, and
condemned to return them within a year, or to furnish a legal
certificate of their death, on pain of one thousand livres, with
exemplary punishment.[G] It is imagined that these young voluntary
Huguenot exiles emigrated to Massachusetts, from the fact that the same
year when this strange cause was tried in France, Jean Touton, a French
doctor, requested from the authorities of that colony the privilege of
sojourning there. This favor was immediately granted; and from that
period _Boston_ possessed establishments formed by Huguenots, which
attracted new emigrants.

In 1679, Elie Nean, the head of an eminent family from the principality
of Soubise, in Saintonge, reached that city. This refugee, sailing
afterwards in his own merchant vessel for the island of Jamaica, was
captured by a privateer, carried back to France, confined in the
galleys, and only restored to his liberty through the intercession of
Lord Portland.

One of the first acts of the Boston Huguenots was to settle a minister,
giving him forty pounds a year, and increasing his salary afterwards.
Surrounded by the savages on every side, they erected a fort, the traces
of which, it is said, can still be seen, and now overgrown with roses,
currant bushes, and other shrubbery. Mrs. Sigourney, herself the wife of
a Huguenot descendant, during a visit to this time-honored spot, wrote
the beautiful lines,--

'Green vine, that mantlest in thy fresh embrace
Yon old gray rock, I hear that thou with them
Didst brave the ocean surge.
Say, drank thus from
The dews of Languedoc? or slow uncoiled
An infant fibre 'mid the faithful mold
Of smiling Roussillon? Didst thou shrink
From the fierce footsteps of fighting unto death
At fair Rochelle?
Hast thou no tale for me?'

Their fort did not render the French settlers safe from the murderous
assaults of savage enemies. A.W. Johnson, with his three children, were
massacred here by them; his wife was a sister of Mr. Andrew Sigourney,
one of the earliest Huguenots. After this murderous attack the French
Protestants deserted their forest home, repairing to Boston in 1696,
where vestige