'" _"One Blank" of Windsor_
(Courant Literary Section, 12, 3, 1904), ANNIE ELIOT TRUMBULL.
Matthew Grant came over with the Dorchester men from the Bay Colony in
1635, and settled in Windsor, Connecticut, where he lived until his
death there in 1683.
He was a land surveyor, and the town clerk, a close observer of men and
their public and private affairs, and kept a careful record of current
events in a "crabbed, eccentric but by no means entirely illegible hand"
during the long years of his sojourn in the "Lord's Waste."
It has been surmised for several years--but without confirmation--and
credited by the highest authorities in Connecticut colonial history, and
known only to one of them, that Grant's manuscript diary contained the
significant historical note as to the fate of Alse Young. It waited two
centuries and more for its true interpreter, as did Wolcott's cipher
notes of Hooker's famous sermon, and there it is, "not made on the
decorous pages which memorize the saints," Brookes, Hooker, Warham,
Reyner, Hanford, and Huit, "but scrawled on the inside of the cover,
where it might be the sinner might escape detection."
In the publication of Grant's note Miss Trumbull has rendered a great
service in the settlement of a disputed question, in the correction of
errors, in fixing the priority of the outbreak between Massachusetts and
Connecticut; and in the new light shining through this revelation stands
Alse, glorified with the qualities of youth, of gentleness, of
innocence; and the story of her going to the unholy sacrifice on that
fateful May morning more than two and a half centuries ago is told with
exquisite tenderness and pathos.
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