appears among those of other hardy settlers of the neighborhood.
No record has been found of his coming, but emigration by that
time had grown so rapid that ships' lists were no longer
carefully preserved. And then he was but a simple yeoman, a
tiller of the soil; one who must have loved the sea, however, for
he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham
woods, until the close of the seventeenth century found his
descendants--my own great-great-grandfatber's family--planted in
a romantic homestead-nook on a hillside, overlooking wide gray
spaces of the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms."
The situation was beautiful, and home attachments proved
tenacious, the family claim to the farm having only been resigned
within the last thirty or forty years.

I am proud of my unlettered forefathers, who were also too humbly
proud to care whether their names would be remembered or not; for
they were God-fearing men, and had been persecuted for their
faith long before they found their way either to Old or New
England.

The name is rather an unusual one, and has been traced back from
Wales and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Pied-
mont; a little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in
what was probably the original spelling-La Combe. There is a
family shield in existence, showing a hill surmounted by a tree,
and a bird with spread wings above. It might symbolize flight in
times of persecution, from the mountains to the forests, and
thence to heaven, or to the free skies of this New World.

But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both