Page:A new England boyhood by Hale, Edward Everett.djvu/24

xiv hood is what mine was, not what anyone else lived through in the same time. There will be a certain convenience, then, to the reader if he knows a little of the household and family in which the boyhood was spent which in these chapters is described.

In the ship Lion, in the voyage of Winthrop's fleet, came to Boston Robert Hale, who was, I suppose, of the Hales of Kent. Searching in the wills of that time in Canter bury, in Kent, I found this:

7. "To my sonne John Hales, five pounds and my best silver guilt sword, yet nevertheless and on this condition"—that he do not intercept the execution of the rest of the will.

And I have a fancy that that son was cut off with a "guilt sword" because he was a Puritan, while the rest of the Hales, or Haleses, were very High Church. So High Church have they been in later times that it was one of them, Sir James Hales, who accompanied James II. into exile. Somehow I connect him with the throwing the Great Seal into the Thames. Within my own memory Hales