perhaps, in the labors of the plantation, mingled with the rural
population, and shared in their sports. The crack of his fowling-piece
re-echoed through the wild woods beyond Procter's Corner; he tended
his father's duck-coys at Humphries' Pond, and angled along the clear
brooks. It is an observable circumstance, as illustrating the
transmission of family traits, that the same ingenious activity and
versatility of mind, which led Emanuel Downing, while carrying on the
multifarious operations of opening a large farm in the forest,
presiding in the local court at Salem, and serving year after year in
the General Court as a deputy, to contrive complicated machinery for
taking wild fowl and getting up distilleries, re-appeared in his son,
on the broader field of the manufactures, finances, and foreign
relations of a great nation.

A tract of three hundred acres, next eastward of the Downing farm, was
granted to Thomas Read. He became a freeman in 1634, was a member of
the Salem Church in 1636, received his grant the same year, and was
acknowledged as an inhabitant, May 2, 1637. The farm is now occupied
and owned by the Hon. Richard S. Rogers. It is a beautiful and
commanding situation, and attests the taste of its original
proprietor. Mr. Read seems to have had a passion for military affairs.
In 1636, he was ensign in a regiment composed of men from Saugus,
Ipswich, Newbury, and Salem, of which John Endicott was colonel, and
John Winthrop, Jr., lieutenant-colonel. In 1647, he commanded a
company. During the civil wars in England, he was attracted back to
his native country. He commanded a regiment in 1660, and held his
place after the Restoration. He died about 1663.

Our antiquarians were long at a loss to understand a sentence in one
of Roger Williams's letters to John Winthrop, Jr., in which he says,