Excerpt from Twenty-Five Years in Old Warwick: An Address Delivered on Memorial Day, August 18, 1904, in Warwick, Mass

But now that I am once more here, let me thank you for the kindness with which you have remembered the sick young man that, at the age of 23, away back in the 4o's, finally left his Warwick home for the life that has carried him through every portion of our own country save the Pacific Coast and the new colonial possessions half round the world. And never has a week passed in that more than half century that the life of 'my childhood, youth and early manhood has not enveloped me, as in a far-off worldof delightful recollections; never more vivid and enchant ing than when, a month ago, I made up my mind that not only pleasure but duty called me back to your yearly festival.

Any stranger can easily learn a good deal of that period of which I speak today, from 1823 to 1848, when Warwick was certainly at its best estate, according to the time-hon ored idea of a successful New England town. There were then 1 150 people the majority of the leading families direct descendants of the settlers, chiefly from what is now the Greater Boston, who, eighty years before, laid out a road from Roxbury 7 5 miles into the Wilderness of Gardner's Roxbury Canada fifteen years later rechristened Warwick as good Squire Blake fancies, in memory of the famous Guy, Earl of Warwick, in the old home across the sea. Probably at no time was the land so productive or well tilled as then. The furore for shaving the town clean of it's grand old forests of beach, chestnut and pine was then only apparent in the fifteen saw mills that turned out for the neighboring towns a million feet of lumber every year. The people still all gathered on Sunday in the old meeting house upon the common although other denominations were not taxed for the support of any save their own public worship. The ten district schools werein full blast. In short; the twenty-five years in old Warwick, of which I speak, cover the period when the town was one of the best illustra tions of country life in the New England of seventy years ago. How it looked from the windows of the parson's house is told in the two charming volumes of Mrs. Fayette Smith, familiar to you. But it is the blessedness of our human lot that every living man and woman becomes a poet and an artist with the retreating years from childhood. Each of the two or three hundred children and youth that came up with myself, if spared long enough, had a separate pic ture of life in old Warwick, beautiful in spite of whatever hardships, toils or trials may have been the environment.

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