mostly from the western provinces of France, had already emigrated, for safety, to British America.  In 1662 the French government made it a crime for the ship-owners of Rochelle to convey emigrants to any country or dependency of Great Britain.  The fine for such an offence was ten livres to the king, nine hundred for charitable objects, three hundred to the palace chapel, one hundred for prisoners, and five hundred to the mendicant monks.  One sea-captain, Brunet, was accused of having favored the escape of thirty-six young men, and condemned to return them within a year, or to furnish a legal certificate of their death, on pain of one thousand livres, with exemplary punishment.[G] It is imagined that these young voluntary Huguenot exiles emigrated to Massachusetts, from the fact that the same year when this strange cause was tried in France, Jean Touton, a French doctor, requested from the authorities of that colony the privilege of sojourning there.  This favor was immediately granted; and from that period Boston possessed establishments formed by Huguenots, which attracted new emigrants.

In 1679, Elie Nean, the head of an eminent family from the principality of Soubise, in Saintonge, reached that city.  This refugee, sailing afterwards in his own merchant vessel for the island of Jamaica, was captured by a privateer, carried back to France, confined in the galleys, and only restored to his liberty through the intercession of Lord Portland.

One of the first acts of the Boston Huguenots was to settle a minister, giving him forty pounds a year, and increasing his salary afterwards.  Surrounded by the savages on every side, they erected a fort, the traces of which, it is said, can still be seen, and now overgrown with roses, currant bushes, and other shrubbery.  Mrs. Sigourney, herself the wife of a Huguenot descendant, during a visit to this time-honored spot, wrote the beautiful lines,—­

’Green vine, that mantlest in thy fresh embrace
Yon old gray rock, I hear that thou with them
Didst brave the ocean surge. 
Say, drank thus from
The dews of Languedoc? or slow uncoiled
An infant fibre ’mid the faithful mold
Of smiling Roussillon?  Didst thou shrink
From the fierce footsteps of fighting unto death
At fair Rochelle? 
Hast thou no tale for me?’

Their fort did not render the French settlers safe from the murderous assaults of savage enemies.  A.W.  Johnson, with his three children, were massacred here by them; his wife was a sister of Mr. Andrew Sigourney, one of the earliest Huguenots.  After this murderous attack the French Protestants deserted their forest home, repairing to Boston in 1696, where vestiges of their industry and agricultural taste long remained; to this day many of the pears retain their French names, and the region is celebrated for its excellence and variety of this delicious fruit.  The Huguenots erected a church at Boston in 1686, and ten years