Sergeant Thomas Putnam did not act as clerk of the parish from April, 1687, to April, 1694.  A few entries are made by his hand; but the record, very meagre and fragmentary, is for the most part made by others.  This is much to be regretted, as the interval covers the very period of our history.  His time, probably, was taken up, and his mind wholly engrossed, by an unhappy family difficulty, in which, during that period, he was involved.  Thomas Putnam Sr. died, as has been stated, in 1686.  It was thought, by the children of his first wife, that the influence of the second wife had been unduly exercised over him, in his last years, so as to induce him to make a will giving to her, and her only child by him, Joseph, a very unfair proportion of his estate.  It was felt by them to be so unjust that they attempted to break the will.  The management of the case was confided to Sergeant Thomas Putnam, as the eldest son of the family; and the affair, it may be supposed, absorbed his thoughts to such a degree as to render it necessary for him to abandon his services as clerk of the parish.  The attempt to set aside the will failed.  The circumstances connected with the subject disturbed very seriously—­perhaps permanently—­the happiness of the whole family, and may have contributed to create the morbid excitement which afterwards was so fearfully displayed by the wife of the younger Thomas.

While Mr. Lawson was at the village, he lost his wife and daughter.  In 1690, he was again married, to Deborah Allen.  He was settled afterwards over the Second Society in Scituate,—­it is singular that our local histories do not tell us when, but that we get all we know on the point from a sentence written by the pen on a leaf of one of the two folio volumes of John Quick’s “Synodicon in Gallia Reformata,” in the possession of a gentleman in this country, Henry M. Dexter, who says it is evidently Quick’s autograph.  It is in these words:  “For my reverend and dear brother, Mr. Lawson, minister of the gospel, and pastor of the church of Scituate, in the province of Massachusetts in New England; from the publisher, John Quick, honoris et amoris ergo, Aug. 6, 1693.”  In 1696, Mr. Lawson went over to England, merely for a short visit, as his people supposed.  They heard from him no more.  He never asked a dismission, or communicated with them in any way.  In 1698, an ecclesiastical council declared them free to settle another minister, which they did in due time.  He was, no doubt, alive and in London when, in 1704, his famous Salem Village sermon was reprinted there.  But this is the last glimpse we have of him.  An inscrutable mystery covers the rest of his history.  His manner of leaving the Scituate parish shows him to have been an eccentric person, leaves an unfavorable impression of his character, and is as inexplicable as the only other reference to him that has thus far been found.  Calamy, in his “Continuation of the Account of Ejected Ministers,” published