some points in his biography in obscurity. In the first place, the
title proves that he had, at the time of his death, no other child. In
the course of it, he tells his daughter, that, when he was fourteen
years of age, his mother, then a widow, removed with him to Cambridge,
and connected him with the University there. His elder brother had
been sent to Oxford for his education. After residing eight years in
Cambridge, he took his Master's degree, and then went up to London,
where he was "struck with the sense of his sinful estate by a sermon
he heard under Paul's, which was about forty years since, which text
was the _burden of Dumah or Idumea_, and stuck fast. This made me to
go into Essex; and after being quieted by another sermon in that
country, and the love and labors of Mr. Thomas Hooker, I there
preached, there married with a good gentlewoman, till I went to London
to ripen my studies, not intending to preach at all." He then relates
the circumstances which subsequently led him again to engage in
preaching. He is stated to have been born in 1599: his death was in
1660. Putting together these dates and facts, it becomes evident that
he could not have been more than twenty-two years of age when he
married "Mistress Read." The "Last Legacy" shows, not merely in the
manner in which he speaks of her,--"a good gentlewoman,"--but, in its
express terms, that she was not the mother of the "only child" to whom
it was addressed. "Besides your mother," he states that he had had "a
godly wife before." There is no indication that there were children by
the earlier marriage. If there were, they died young. He married, for
his second wife, Deliverance Sheffield, at Boston, in March, 1639.

His first wife, the time of whose death is unknown, had left the
children by her former husband in his hands and under his care. He
evidently cherished the memory of the "good gentlewoman of Essex" with
the tenderest and most sacred affection. She had not only been the