As tenants of uncertain stay,
    So may we live our little day
    That only grateful hearts shall fill
    The homes we leave in Haverhill.

Thus writes the poet Whittier, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the City of Haverhill in America.  Most of us know there is a Haverhill in England, where resided Mr. D. Gurteen, who died recently in his eighty-fourth year, one of the grand old men—occasionally met with—who have spent all their lives in promoting the best interests, moral and pecuniary, of the community amongst whom they live.  He was born when Haverhill was in a state of decay, its chief manufacture, that of silk, having dwindled all to nothing.  He has almost rebuilt the place, and made it one of the most prosperous of our East Anglian towns.  Haverhill, in a remote corner of East Anglia, is intimately connected with the American Haverhill.  That was founded by the grandson of a well-known Haverhill clergyman—Rev. John Ward—one of the early Puritans who suffered for conscience sake, and against whom Romanising archbishops like Laud—in whose seat the present Archbishop of London tells us he is proud to be placed—made constant war.  John Ward, whose monument is still to be seen in Haverhill Church, had a descendant named Nathaniel, who was educated at Cambridge, and went out into the wilderness of New England rather than remain the victim of persecution in the old country.  He was a ripe scholar, and a man of p. 59great practical ability, a Puritan of the Puritans, who helped to mould the character and make the laws of the people of whom he became the minister.  The hardy settlers, who had hitherto toiled in hope, overjoyed at Ward’s coming, insisted on naming their plantation—hitherto called Pentucket, after the Indian tribe who had lived there till bought out by the whites—Haverhill, from the birthplace of their honoured minister.  In the recent celebration Haverhill in England was not forgotten.  Mr. Alderman Gurteen and the rector were invited.  The rector could not go.  Mr. Alderman Gurteen could, and he crossed the Atlantic, bearing with him an address, handsomely got up, to the New England Haverhill.  He was received with open arms, and on his return was honoured with a dinner in the Town Hall, presided over by his respected father, Mr. D. Gurteen, J.P., and there he delivered himself of his American experiences, and was listened to eagerly by a sympathetic audience, among whom I had the good luck to be one.

New Haverhill stands on the banks of the Merrimack, at a distance of some sixteen miles from the sea.  The Merrimack deserves a line as the most noted water-power stream in the world.  Haverhill lies on the north edge of Essex county, itself the north-eastern corner of Massachusetts.  In the Haverhill of to-day there are over 250 firms engaged in the manufacture of shoes, and giving employment to 18,000 operatives, and distributing annually over 2,225,000 dollars in wages, and shipping 300,000 cases of completed boots and shoes.  It is a big city, thirty-three miles off Boston by rail.  The situation is picturesque, with an undulating surface, watered by lovely lakes and the glorious river.  Haverhill rejoices in a Town Hall, one of the handsomest of its kind in New England, and twenty-four church organisations divided among eleven different denominations.  No city in the commonwealth has grown so fast within the last ten years.  I learn from a local paper that its population is “energetic, prosperous, and cultivated.”  One of the things which seem to have struck p. 60Mr. Alderman Gurteen, as indeed it would some of us, was a handsome and commodious building known as the Old Ladies’ Home, intended to provide for such women as need it, a home in their declining years.  Again, there is a Children’s Aid Society, formed and managed by women, to furnish a real home for destitute children.  Haverhill has also a noble hospital, where almost every religious society in the city supports free beds.  Such is the Haverhill of to-day.  It has suffered from fire; from Indians, who rushed through it with their murderous tomahawks: (one of the things Mr. Alderman Gurteen was taken to see at the exhibition in connection with the anniversary, was the basket of grass in which Hannah Duston, one of Haverhill’s ancient heroines, carried the scalps of the Indians in the cour............