1758.  “Thomas Mansfield, Esquire, was thrown from his horse on Friday, January 6, and died the next Sunday.

“A company of soldiers, from Lynn, marched for Canada, on the twenty-third of May.  Edmund Ingalls and Samuel Mudge were killed.

“In a thunder-shower, on the fourth of August, an ox belonging to Mr. Henry Silsbee was killed by lightning.

“A sloop from Lynn, commanded by Captain Ralph Lindsay, was cast away on the fifteenth of August, near Portsmouth.”

In this pretended “History,” the whole of the eighteenth century receives but sixty-two pages, and that part of the nineteenth which had elapsed at the time of publication receives only one hundred and seventeen.  In the latter an average entry is the following, under date of 1856:—­

“Patrick Buckley, the ‘Lynn Buck,’ ran five miles in twenty-eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds, at the Trotting Park, for a belt valued at fifty dollars.  And on the fourth of December, William Hendley ran the same distance in twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds.”

The “Lynn Buck,” seems to have been an important personage in those days, for we read under date of 1858:—­

“The ‘Lynn Buck,’ so called, walked a plank at Lowell, in February, a hundred and five consecutive hours and forty-four minutes, and with but twenty-nine minutes’ rest.  A strict watch was kept on him.”

We are very glad to know about the “strict watch,” but really it was too bad of the authors not to let us know if those forty-four minutes, also, were not consecutive.  They might, too, have told us to advantage something about the modus operandi of “walking a plank.”  It has been the general impression that the man who walks a plank performs the operation in an unpleasant hurry—­unpleasant for him; and that he will take all the rest he can get—­before he begins; and that he has an eternal rest, or unrest, after he has finished.  But perhaps this has been a wrong impression.  If the authors are alive, it is due to the public that they should rise and explain.

Enough of pleasantry.  Let us examine the book with serious mind, if we can.  Everybody knows that shoes have been the making of Lynn, that they are and have been for years the backbone of its prosperity, the life of its business.  To say that Lynn is the greatest shoe-manufacturing city in the country, and, for that matter, in the world, may be an exaggeration, but it is a very common one.  In a history of Lynn we might expect this fact to be at least recognized.  Let us see how that is in the present case.