The place has about it an indescribable soothing atmosphere of
respectability and comfort. Here rest the remains of the principal and
loftiest in rank in their generation of the citizens of Portsmouth prior
to the Revolution--stanch, royalty-loving governors, counselors, and
secretaries of the Providence of New Hampshire, all snugly gathered
under the motherly wing of the Church of England. It is almost
impossible to walk anywhere without stepping on a governor. You grow
haughty in spirit after a while, and scorn to tread on anything less
than one of His Majesty's colonels or secretary under the Crown. Here
are the tombs of the Atkinsons, the Jaffreys, the Sherburnes, the
Sheafes, the Marshes, the Mannings, the Gardners, and others of the
quality. All around you underfoot are tumbled-in coffins, with here and
there a rusty sword atop, and faded escutcheons, and crumbling armorial
devices. You are moving in the very best society.

This, however, is not the earliest cemetery in Portsmouth. An hour's
walk from the Episcopal yard will bring you to the spot, already
mentioned, where the first house was built and the first grave made,
at Odiorne's Point. The exact site of the Manor is not known, but it is
supposed to be a few rods north of an old well of still-flowing water,
at which the Tomsons and the Hiltons and their comrades slaked their
thirst more than two hundred and sixty years ago. Oriorne's Point is
owned by Mr. Eben L. Odiorne, a lineal descendant of the worthy who held
the property in 1657. Not far from the old spring is the resting-place
of the earliest pioneers.

"This first cemetery of the white man in New Hampshire," writes Mr.
Brewster, (1. Mr. Charles W. Brewster, for nearly fifty years the
editor of the Portsmouth Journal, and the author of two volumes of
local sketches to which the writer of these pages here acknowledges his