Of his wife, Rebecca Tyng, there exists, so far as I am aware, but one authentic portrait, the very interesting one belonging to this Society; but, in the course of my inquiries into this subject, I received information that in the family of the late Mr. Dudley Hall, of Medford, were portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Dudley, by Sir Peter Lely. As Lely never visited this country, and died before Dudley first went abroad, I was a little incredulous; and on going out to Medford, I found two charming pictures, apparently painted by Smibert, and representing, as I have every reason to believe, Joseph Dudley's son William, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1726 to 1729, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Judge Addington Davenport, — the said Mr. and Mrs. William Dudley having been the great-grandparents of the late Mr. Dudley Hall. It is not to be wondered at that such mistakes continually occur about old family portraits, when we consider how indifferent our wives and children often are to the associations connected with them, and how difficult they generally find it to give an accurate description of them. I am bound to add that a somewhat similar blunder was made long ago concerning the one of Joseph Dudley now at Brookline; for when, in 1860, it came into the possession of its present owner, on the death of a kinsman at New London, he found pasted on the back of it this distich: - "Sir Thomas Dudley 's a trusty old stud, A bargain's a bargain & must be made good." In other words, the writer of this doggerel on the back of that portrait clearly supposed it to represent, not Governor Joseph, but his father, Governor Thomas Dudley, a likeness of whom would, I need not say, be a great prize, for none is known to exist. The figure, however, is attired in the costume and long, full-bottomed wig of the later Stuart period; and no one at all acquainted with historical portraiture would be willing, for a moment, to accept it as Thomas Dudley, who After careful examination, however, I believe the sallowness in question to be merely the effect of age and neglect, and the "dressing-gown" looks to me more like a judicial robe. As Dudley was named Chief Justice of New York about that time, he may have had himself so painted. The learned editor of the "Memorial History" has expressed to me his regret that the Drake engraving should have been followed without verification. 1 Professor Norton possesses a replica, or ancient copy, of this also. died at a very advanced age in 1653. My conjecture as to the origin of this mistake is, I think, a reasonable one. At Joseph Dudley's death, in 1720, this portrait became the property of his daughter, Mrs. Winthrop, who survived her father more than half a century, and died in 1776 at the great age of ninety-two. This venerable lady had outlived her sons, and the portrait then passed to her eldest grandson, a young man with a number of younger brothers, some one of whom (according to my theory) having always heard the picture spoken of at his grandmother's as Governor Dudley, hastily assumed it to be the more distinguished of the two Governors Dudley, and amused himself by scribbling on it accordingly. Had he been a man of cultivation, he would have undoubtedly preferred to transcribe several of the lines in which Thomas Dudley's daughter, Anne Bradstreet, the first New England poetess, has so quaintly and touchingly commemorated her father; but being, as he probably was, a youngster with a not very refined sense of humor, he preferred the above-mentioned distich, which was by no means original with him, as it has been ascribed to no less authoritative a pen than that of Governor Jonathan Belcher, though in my own judgment it is more likely to be a survival of the doggerel of the colonial period. The correct version begins, not "Sir Thomas," but "Here lies Thomas;" and the writer, relying upon an imperfect memory, managed to confer upon his assumed great-great-grandfather the honor of knighthood. For the benefit of those who may not have found leisure to devote much attention to the domestic history of Puritan times, it is as well to explain, by way of parenthesis, that the reason why this irreverent, not to say flippant, expression, "trusty old stud," was applied to so eminent and austere a magistrate as Thomas Dudley, is to be found in the fact that no less than three of the children of his second marriage were born after he had entered upon his seventieth year. I will only add, in conclusion, that I can find no trace of the numerous confidential letters which Cutts must have received from his Lieutenant-Governor during their eight years of official association, and which his Lordship perhaps destroyed. The Winthrop Papers include many of Dudley's domestic letters, and among them several written by him from the Isle of Wight to his wife in New England; but they contain not the remotest reference to public affairs, and consist, for the most part, of slightly monotonous expressions of conjugal endearment, intermingled with reiterated and edifying assurances that the consolations of religion alone sustained him during so protracted an absence from his family.1 Mr. APPLETON then spoke as follows: At the last meeting Mr. Jenks showed a photograph, and gave a very interesting account, of the flag carried to Concord, April 19, 1775, by the company of minute-men from Bedford. The photograph did not reach me during the meeting; but afterwards, as soon as I saw it, I immediately recognized it, and recognized it as of far greater interest and importance than was suggested by Mr. Jenks. The flag borne at Concord on the 19th of April is the flag designed in England, 1660–70, for the Three-County Troop of Massachusetts. In 1870 Messrs. Somerby and Chester, at almost the same date, sent to Boston extracts from MS. Additional 26,683 in the British Museum, being the design and charges for a flag for the Three-County Troop, as follows: Worke don for New England For painting in oyle on both sides a Cornett one rich crimson damask, with a hand and sword and invelloped with a scarfe about the arms of gold, black and sillver For a plaine cornett Staffe, with belt, boote and swible at first For silke of crimson and silver fring and for a Cornett String 2. 0.6 1. 0.0 1.11.0 11.0 5. 2.6 It is evident that this flag became one of the accepted standards of the organized militia of Massachusetts, and as such was used by the Bedford Company. Of this Admiral Preble 1 A still further illustration of the untrustworthiness of family traditions is supplied by the fact that there was long ago presented to the Cabinet of this Society a quaint bit of provincial furniture, purporting to be the " Cradle of Governor Joseph Dudley." It has recently been noticed, however, that the rows of antique brass nails which ornament it, and which are evidently coeval with the woodwork, are so disposed on top as to form the distinct date “1730,” which is eightythree years after the Governor first became a candidate for a cradle, and about the time that several of his grandchildren were in need of one. had neither knowledge nor suspicion; and I must sincerely wish that he were alive, to insert it in his remarkable work on Our Flag, and to add to my words such facts as he might be more fortunate in finding than I have been, for as yet I have learned nothing more of the use of this design. But it seems to me that this flag of April 19, 1775, far exceeds in historic value the famed flag of Eutaw and Pulaski's banner, and in fact is the most precious memorial of its kind of which we have any knowledge. This flag, with the hand and sword, may have been carried on the banks of the Connecticut by the men who, under Major Samuel Appleton, so stoutly resisted the Indians at Hadley and Hatfield; and afterwards, under the same leader, may have been borne into the captured fort in the swamp of the Narragansetts. Later the same symbols were undoubtedly seen on the shores of Lake George and Lake Champlain. The men of Massachusetts may very possibly have used such a flag in the early battles of the Revolution; and at this day we honor it as the crest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, under which thousands fought and died in the sad but glorious years from 1861 to 1865. The Hon. ROBERT C. WINTHROP presented from the Hon. John Bigelow, of New York, late minister to France, and author of an elaborate Life of Franklin, five ancient maps, on one of which the name of this city is spelled "Baston," and on another Briston." The Hudson River on one of them is styled the "great river," and four other names are also given to it as being in current use. It was ordered that the grateful acknowledgments of the Society be sent to the donor for his gift. Mr. WINSOR made the following communication: Professor Horsford, of Cambridge, in the pursuit of some studies in the early cartography of the New England coast, has been induced to believe that a trading-post and fort of the French in the early part of the sixteenth century was situated upon Charles River. Estimating the distance up the stream according to some of the early descriptions, he sought a spot at the confluence of Stony Brook with Charles River in the town of Weston, and found there a ditch and embankment, which apparently have escaped the attention of all the local antiquaries of Watertown, Waltham, Weston, and Newton, since an examination of all their publications reveals no reference to them. This ditch, which is not far from sixteen hundred feet in length, runs parallel in the main to the water line of the river and brook, within the angle caused by their confluence, and follows the contour line of fifty-one feet above tide-water for most of its course; but towards the southerly end it descends somewhat, and is lost in an expansion upon a point jutting into Charles River. About midway it bends into a loop, which nearly fills the apex of the angle. Across the base of this loop is another excavation of a like kind, which seems to have completed the circuit of the knoll lying within the loop, though a cartway across this supplemental ditch has obliterated it at one place. A survey which Professor Horsford has caused to be made reveals so constant a level of the excavation as to preclude a belief in its being the result of natural causes, and its construction and direction seem to determine that it could not have been an ancient sluice way, though some walling of stone at the upper end might indicate an intention of converting a portion of it to such purposes at a later day. The spot is now covered with a young growth of wood; but there are signs that a growth of large trees has been twice cut from it, some of which stood in the ditch. The levelness of the ditch would have adapted it to holding still water, as a part of a defensive work; but the excavation is too narrow for such purpose, and the earth is thrown towards the enemy (a river). It is, however, just such a ditch as would be dug in which to plant a stockade, returning the earth about the base. The fact that the embankment is continued three hundred feet both north and south from the enclosed portion, in a way to afford no protection against attack, seems to indicate that the whole work is but a segment of a line of circumvallation which was left unfinished, the stockade not being planted in the portions already excavated. I refrain from outlining Professor Horsford's arguments and proofs of his belief, as that gentleman has already done so in a letter addressed to Judge Daly, which is printed in the Journal of the American Geographical Society. Researches of my own lead me rather to the opinion that these relics may |