The report of this Committee was received and accepted, and the Committee was discharged.

The following persons, nominated by the Committee, were then elected by ballot, as the Council of thirteen members having the powers of directors, namely:

OSCAR F. ALLEN,
EDWARD J. BRANDON,

FRANK GAYLORD COOK,

RICHARD HENRY DANA,

HENRY HERBERT EDES,
MARY ISABELLA GOZZALDI,
ALBERT BUSHNELL HART,

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON,
ARCHIBALD M. HOWE,
WILLIAM C. LANE,

ALICE M. Longfellow,
ALEXANDER MCKENZIE,
WILLIAM R. THAYER.

Out of the Council were elected by ballot the following:

The Secretary-elect was duly sworn; and the meeting

was dissolved.

THE SECOND MEETING

BEING THE FIRST ANNUAL MEETING

THE SECOND MEETING, being the First Annual Meeting,

of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY was held the thirtieth day of October, nineteen hundred and five, at a quarter before eight o'clock in the evening, in the building of the Cambridge Latin School, Trowbridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the President, RICHARD HENRY DANA, presiding.

The Minutes of the last meeting were read and approved. The following persons were chosen a Committee to consider and report a list of nominations for the offices of the Society for the ensuing year: HOLLIS R. BAILEY, ANDREW MCFARLAND DAVIS, and SUSANNA WILLARD.

The report of this Committee was read and accepted, and the Committee was discharged.

The following persons, nominated by the Committee, were elected by ballot for the ensuing year:

The Secretary-elect was duly sworn.

Brief reports of progress were made from Special Committees, appointed by the Council, upon the following subjects, and by the following persons:

On the Early Roads and Topography of Cambridge.

STEPHEN P. SHARPLES.

On the Identification and Marking of Historic Sites in Cambridge. HOLLIS R. BAILEY.

On the Collection of Oral Traditions and of Early Letters and other Documents of Citizens of Cambridge.

CAROLINE L. PARSONS.

On Sketches of Noted Citizens of Cambridge.

MARY ISABELLA GOZZALDI.

On Making a Roll of Historical Documents concerning the Founding and Early Years of Cambridge.

ANDREW MCFARLAND DAVIS.

On a Seal for the Society.
THE SECRETARY.

REMINISCENCES OF OLD CAMBRIDGE

BEING IN PART THE REPORT OF AN INFORMAL ADDRESS TO THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 30, 1905.

BY CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

WHEN the pleasant invitation to speak this evening came to me, I hesitated to accept it, but on reflection, I put doubt aside and welcomed the opportunity to express my piety for my native town, and to say how dear a privilege I count it to have been born in Cambridge and to have spent here much the greater part of my life, and how deeply I reverence the ancestors who have bequeathed to us the blessing of their virtues and the fruits of their labors. Few

towns have had a more notable succession of worthies than Cambridge, and, as a result in large part of the character of these men and women, the story of the town contains the record of many events not merely of local interest, but such as connect it with the history of the country and with the progress of civilization during the last two hundred and fifty years.

Dr. Paige, in his trustworthy "History of Cambridge,” says that "for nearly two hundred years after its foundation Cambridge increased very slowly in population and wealth." It was just about two hundred years after the foundation that my recollections of Cambridge begin. I was three years old in 1830, and the town. and the townspeople then were in many respects more widely different from what they are to-day than they then were from what they had been during any part of the preceding one hundred and fifty years.

Old Cambridge was still a country village, distinguished from other similar villages mainly by the existence of the College, concerning which Dr. Paige says with dry humor: "The College gave employment to several professors, mechanics, and boardinghouse keepers;" and one may add that it separated Old Cambridge, in its social characteristics, from the other sections of the town further than its mere local distance from them would justify. Wide spaces of wood and swamp and pasture divided Lechmere Point, as East Cambridge was then termed, from Cambridgeport, and parted both of them from Old Cambridge, and this physical separation was a type of the wider division of interests and associations.

So great are the changes in the town since my childhood that the aspects and conditions of those days seem more than a lifetime away. I have the happiness of passing my old age in the house in which I was born. It has always been my home; but when I was a boy, it was in the country- now it is suburban and in the heart of a city. Kirkland Street was a country road with not a single house on its southern side, but with a wide stretch quite over to Harvard Street of marsh land and huckleberry pasture, with channels running through the thick growth of shrubs, often frozen in the winter, and on which we boys used to skate over the very site of the building in which we have met to-night. Down as far as to Inman Square the region was solitary, while beyond Inman Square,

toward Boston, was an extensive wood of pines with a dense underbrush, the haunt, as we boys used to believe, of gamblers and other bad characters from the neighboring city, and to be swiftly hurried by if nightfall caught us near it. The whole region round my father's house was, indeed, so thinly settled that it preserved its original rural character. It was rich in wild growth, and well known to botanists as the habitat of many rare wild-flowers; the marshes were fragrant in spring with the azalia and the clethra; and through spring, summer, and autumn there was a profuse procession of the familiar flowers of New England. It was a favorite resort of birds, but there is now little left of it fit for their homes, though many of them still revisit in their migrations the noisy locality where their predecessors enjoyed a peaceful and retired abode.

But even a greater change than that from country village to suburban town has taken place here in Old Cambridge in the last seventy years. The people have changed. In my boyhood the population was practically all of New England origin, and in large proportion Cambridge-born, and inheritors of Old Cambridge traditions. The fruitful invasion of barbarians had not begun. The foreign-born people could be counted up on the fingers. There was Rule, the excellent Scotch gardener, who was not without points of resemblance to Andrew Fairservice; there was Sweetman, the one Irish day-laborer, faithful and intelligent, trained as a boy in one of the "hedge-schools" of his native Ireland, and ready to lean on his spade and put the troublesome schoolboy to a test on the Odes of Horace, or even on the Arma virumque cano; and at the heart of the village was the hair-cutter Marcus Reamie, from some unknown foreign land, with his shop full, in a boy's eyes, of treasures, some of his own collecting, some of them brought from distant romantic parts of the world by his sailor son. There were doubtless other foreigners, but I do not recall them, except a few teachers of languages in the College, of whom three filled in these and later years an important place in the life of the town, — Dr. Beck, Dr. Follen, and Mr. Sales. But the intermixture of foreign elements was so small as not to affect the character of the town; in fact, everybody knew not only everybody else in person, but also much of everybody's tradition, connections, and mode of life. It has been a pathetic experience for me to live all my life in one community and to find myself gradually becoming a stranger to it, and