indebtedness.) "occupies a space of perhaps one hundred feet by ninety,
and is well walled in. The western side is now used as a burial-place
for the family, but two thirds of it is filled with perhaps forty
graves, indicated by rough head and foot stones. Who there rest no one
now living knows. But the same care is taken of their quiet beds as if
they were of the proprietor's own family. In 1631 Mason sent over about
eighty emigrants many of whom died in a few years, and here they were
probably buried. Here too, doubtless, rest the remains of several of
those whose names stand conspicuous in our early state records."




IV. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued)

WHEN Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789 he was not much impressed by
the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in
the struggle for independence. "There are some good houses," he
writes, in a diary kept that year during a tour through Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, "among which Colonel Langdon's may
be esteemed the first; but in general they are indifferent, and almost
entirely of wood. On wondering at this, as the country is full of stone
and good clay for bricks, I was told that on account of the fogs and
damp they deemed them wholesomer, and for that reason preferred wood
buildings."

The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is an excellent sample
of the solid and dignified abodes which our great-grandsires had the
sense to build. The art of their construction seems to have been a lost
art these fifty years. Here Governor John Langdon resided from 1782