variety of trusts.  His old Bible, now in the possession of Mr. George Livermore of Cambridge, represented the divine presence and law in his household, for all its members, parents and children, masters and servants.  He entertained hospitably his full share of “the godly preachers,” who were the wandering luminaries, and, in some respects, the angelic visitants of those days.  He was evidently a very patient listener to sermons, though we have not the proof in any surviving notebooks of his that one of his excellent son John’s furnishes us, that he took pains to transcribe the heads, the savory passages, and the textual attestations of the elaborate, but utterly juiceless sermons of the time.  The entries in his almanacs afford a curious variety, in which interesting events of public importance alternate with homely details touching the affairs of his neighborhood and the incidents in the domestic life of his relatives and acquaintance.  One matter, as we shall soon see, on which a fact in the life, of Governor Winthrop depends, finds an unexpected disclosure from Adam’s pen.  Here are a few excerpts from these entries:—­“1597.  The VIth of July I received a privie seale to lend the Q. matie [Elizabeth] LXX. for a yere.”—­“1602.  Sept. the 27th day in ye mornying the Bell did goe for mother [a conventional epithet] Tiffeyn, but she recouered.”  This decides a matter which has sometimes been disputed,—­that, while with us, in our old times, “the passing bell” indicated the progress of a funeral train, anciently in England it signified that a soul was believed to be passing from a body supposed to be in extremis.  And a doleful sound it must have been to those of whom it made a false report, as of “mother Tiffeyn.”—­“Decem. ye XXI day my brother Alibaster came to my house & toulde me yt he made certayne inglishe verses in his sleepe, wh. he recited unto me, & I lent him XLs.”—­“1603 April ye 28th day was the funeralles kept at Westminster for our late Queene Elizabethe.”—­“1603.  On Munday ye seconde of Maye, one Keitley, a blackesmythe, dwellinge in Lynton in Cambridgeshire, had a poore man to his father whom he kepte.  A gentleman of ye same Towne sent a horse to shoe, the father held up the horses legge whilest his soonne did shoe him.  The horse struggled & stroke the father on ye belly with his foote & overthrewe him.  The soonne laughed thereat & woulde not helpe his father uppe, for the which some that were present reproved him greatlye.  The soonne went forwarde in shoinge of ye horse, & when he had donne he went uppon his backe, mynding to goe home with him.  The horse presently did throughe him of his backe against a poste & clave his hed in sonder.  Mistress Mannocke did knowe ye man, for his mother was her nurse. Grave judicium Dei in irrisorem patris sui.”  These little scraps of Latin, sometimes running into a distich, are frequent signs of a certain classical proclivity of the writer.  Any one who should infer,