these the father and mother soon made their choice upon strictly business principles, and shortly announced to Mary that a certain ambitious gentleman of the legal profession had furnished the most satisfactory credentials, and that nothing remained but for her to name the day.  Now the fourth commandment was very far from being the dead letter in 1670 that it is in 1885, and it was matter for grave surprise to the elders that their usually obedient daughter, when the lawyer proceeded to plead, refused to hear, and peremptorily adjourned his cause without day.  Maternal expostulation and paternal threats availed nothing.  The because of Mary’s contumacy was not far to seek.  A stalwart Vulcan in the guise of an Antinous, known as Jonas Prescott, had wandered from his father’s forge in Lancaster down the Bay Path to Sudbury.  Mary and he had met, and the lingering of their parting boded ill for any predestination not stamped with their joint seal of consent.  With that lack of astuteness proverbially exhibited by parents disappointed in match-making designs upon their children, the vexed father and mother began a course of vigorous repression, and thereby riveted more firmly than ever the chains which the errant young blacksmith and his apprentice Cupid had forged.  In due time, they perforce learned that love’s flame burns the brighter fed upon a bread and water diet; and that confinement to an attic may be quite endurable when Cupid’s messages fly in and out of its lattice at pleasure.

Finally Mary was secretly sent to an out-of-the-way neighborhood in the vain hope that the chill of absence might hinder what home rule had only served to help.  But one day Jonas on a hunting excursion made the acquaintance of some youth, who, among other chitchat, happened to break into ecstatic praise of the graces of a certain fair damsel who had recently come to live in a farm-house near their home.  Of course the anvil missed Jonas for the next day, and the next, and the next, while he experienced the hospitalities of his new-found friends—­and their neighbors.  It was time for a recognition of the inevitable by all concerned, but when, and with what grace Mary’s stubborn parents yielded, if at all, is not recorded.  But what mattered that?  Old John Prescott installed Jonas at the Nonacoicus Mill, and endowed him with all his Groton lands, and in Lancaster, December 14, 1672, Jonas and Mary were married.  For over fifty years fortunes railed upon their union.  Four sons and eight daughters graced their fireside, and the father was trusted and clothed with local dignities.  In after time the memory of Jonas and Mary has been honored by many worthy descendants, and especially by the gallant services of Colonel William Prescott at Bunker Hill, and the literary renown of William Hickling Prescott, the historian.