[Illustration:  CHURCH OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD (FRENCH CATHOLIC)]

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THE LAST PORTRAIT OF DANIEL WEBSTER.

The many who cherish the memory of DANIEL WEBSTER with more than common interest and veneration, are fortunate, in that the records of his life, his habits and his appearance are so complete.  The portraits of Webster, now extant, represent the great statesman at numerous periods of his life.

[Illustration]

In July, 1852, Mr. Webster was in Franklin, N.H., and there sat for his picture to the local artist of the town, who finished an excellent daguerrotype.  The picture was given by Mr. Webster to the Hon. Stephen M. Allen, who now has it in his possession at the rooms of the Webster Historical Society, in the Old South Meeting House, and by whose courtesy it is here reproduced.

In October of the same year, three months after the picture was made, Daniel Webster at his Marshfield home, breathed his last; leaving this portrait the last ever taken of him from life.

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FORT SHIRLEY.

By Prof.  A.L.  Perry of Williams College.

The recent centennial celebration in the town of Heath, Franklin County, Massachusetts, has freshened up an interest in the history of the old fort that was built within its borders, at the opening of the Old French War in 1744, by the State of Massachusetts.  The present writer, however, has made a study for many years of that and its kindred forts, has repeatedly visited and critically examined its site, and has in his possession the chief movable memorials of what was indeed a small, yet in its historical connections a deeply interesting, military outpost.

The first white men known or supposed to have ever penetrated the original forests in the town of Heath were Richard Hazen and six others, the surveyor and chain-men and their assistants, who ran the official northern line of Massachusetts in the early spring of 1741.  Besides the surveyor himself, who was then a prominent citizen of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, and his son of the same name, then nineteen years old, the party consisted of Caleb Swan, Benjamin Smith, Zachariah Hildrith, Ebenezer Shaw and William Richardson.  Under an imperative order from the Privy Council in England, Governor Belcher, who at that time administered government over both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, commissioned Hazen to run the ultimate line between the two, beginning at a point three miles north of Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimac (now Lowell), and extending on a due west course till it should meet His Majesty’s other Governments.  This arbitrary decision of the Privy Council in selecting the very southernmost point in the whole course of the Merrimac, as the place meant in in the old Charter of Massachusetts