The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 | Page 2

36 White and Franconia Mountains, The (24 Illustrations) Fred Myron Colby 76 Witch, The first New England Willard H. Morse M.D. 270 Worcester, The City of Fanny Bullock Workman 147 (18 Illustrations)

POEMS.
By The Sea Teresa Herrick 377 Equinoctial Sidney Maxwell 383 Growing Old 299 In Ember Days Adelaide G. Waldron 277 Memory's Pictures Charles Carleton Coffin (1846) 124 The Muse of History Elizabeth Porter Gould 248 Room At The Top 366 The Old State House Sidney Maxwell 414 Idleness Sidney Harrison 183 A Birthday Sonnet George W. Bungay 201

STEEL ENGRAVINGS.
Charles Carleton Coffin Facing 1 John B. Clarke 9 Sylvester Marsh 65 John Albion Andrew 141 John D. Long 221 Hugh O'Brien 253 William Wallace Crapo 309 Henry W. Paine 391

[Illustration: Charles Carleton Coffin]

THE BAY STATE MONTHLY.
A Massachusetts Magazine
VOL. III. APRIL, 1885. NO. I.
* * * * *

CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN.
Among the emigrants from England to the western world in the great Puritan exodus was Joanna Thember Coffin, widow, and her son Tristram, and her two daughters, Mary and Eunice. Their home was in Brixton, two miles from Plymouth, in Devonshire. Tristram was entering manhood's prime--thirty-three years of age. He had a family of five children. Quite likely the political troubles between the King and Parliament, the rising war cloud, was the impelling motive that induced the family to leave country, home, friends, and all dear old things, and become emigrants to the New World. Quite likely Tristram, when a youth, in 1620, may have seen the Mayflower spread her white sails to the breeze and fade away in the western horizon, for the departure of that company of pilgrims must have been the theme of conversation in and around Plymouth. Without doubt it set the young man to thinking of the unexplored continent beyond the stormy Atlantic. In 1632 his neighbors and friends began to leave, and in 1642 he, too, bade farewell to dear old England, to become a citizen of Massachusetts Bay.
He landed at Newbury, settled first in Salisbury, and ferried people across the Merrimack between Salisbury and Newbury. His wife, Dionis, brewed beer for thirsty travellers. The Sheriff had her up before the courts for charging more per mug than the price fixed by law, but she went scot free on proving that she put in an extra amount of malt. We may think of the grave and reverend Justices ordering the beer into court and settling the question by personal examination of the foaming mugs,--smacking their lips satisfactorily, quite likely testing it a second time.
Tristram Coffin became a citizen of Newbury and built a house, which is still standing. In 1660 he removed with a portion of his family to Nantucket, dying there in 1681, leaving two sons, from whom have descended all the Coffins of the country--a numerous and widespread family.
One of Tristram's decendants, Peter, moved from Newbury to Boscawen, New Hampshire, in 1766, building a large two-storied house. He became a prominent citizen of the town--a Captain of the militia company, was quick and prompt in all his actions. The news of the affair at Lexington and Concord April 19,1775, reached Boscawen on the afternoon of the next day. On the twenty-first Peter Coffin was in Exeter answering the roll call in the Provincial assembly--to take measures for the public safety.
His wife, Rebecca Hazelton Coffin, was as energetic and patriotic as he. In August, 1777, everybody, old and young, turned out to defeat Burgoyne. One soldier could not go, because he had no shirt. It was this energetic woman, with a babe but three weeks old, who cut a web from the loom and sat up all night to make a shirt for the soldier. August came, the wheat was ripe for the sickle. Her husband was gone, the neighbors also. Six miles away was a family where she thought it possible she might obtain a harvest hand. Mounting the mare, taking the babe in her arms, she rode through the forest only to find that all the able-bodied young men had gone to the war. The only help to be had was a barefoot, hatless, coatless boy of fourteen.
"He can go but he has no coat," said the mother of the boy.
"I can make him a coat," was the reply.
The boy leaped upon the pillion, rode home with the woman--went out with his sickle to reap the bearded grain, while the house wife, taking a meal bag for want of other material, cutting a hole in the bottom, two holes in the sides, sewing a pair of her own stockings on for sleeves, fulfilled her promise of providing a coat, then laid her babe beneath the shade of a tree and bound the sheaves.
It is a picture of the trials, hardships and patriotism of the people in the most trying hour of the revolutionary