The Grafton immigrants came from England to Salem. It is a tradition that Richard Grafton, King's printer to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and printer of the Great Bible and the First Prayer Book of Edward VI., who was sent to the Tower for issuing Lady Jane Grey's proclamation, was an ancestor. One of the Salem Graftons presented a Bible to Harvard College.

Major Joseph Grafton had been a distinguished officer - thanked in General Orders of the regular army in the War of 1812, later becoming Surveyor of the Port. Mrs. Grafton was the daughter of the Hon. John Ward Gurley, first Attorney-General of Louisiana, and Grace Hanfield Stackpole, said to have been the handsomest woman of her day in New England. From this ancestress, perhaps, came the endowment of personal beauty, as from many other distinguished forbears were inherited gifts and graces which were to mark the youth's fitness, and which were the ordinary indications for a brilliant worldly career. In this case, perchance, another illustration may be found of that "mystery in our probation" upon which the pious Isaac Williams comments with such beauty, inasmuch as "in the saints of God the character acquired by the gift of the Holy Spirit is often that which is most opposed to the natural tendencies and dispositions." The very fitness and the easy opportunities for social success, for pleasure seeking and the pursuits of ambition, were divinely appointed to develop their extremes: retirement, renunciation, and humility. Active discountenance,

much more than would be shown in our day of tolerant indifferentism, was then exhibited towards any inclination to the Faith or to any disposition to recognize its expression. But there were conditions in the lad's youth which kept him somewhat apart from the natural associations with his circle of friends and relatives.

After three years in the historical Boston Latin School, which he entered in 1843, he spent a short time at the Phillips-Andover Academy, where he was attacked by a trouble in the eyes, so that he was obliged to continue his education with a private

tutor.

The Church of the Advent had begun its important and eventful history, December 3, 1844, in an upper room at No. 13 Merrimac Street, and after another change of habitation to a hall at Causeway and Lowell Streets, it had found a home, on Advent Sunday, November 28, 1847, in a commodious but rigidly simple edifice in Green Street. The establishment of this work in Boston (the name of which was suggested by Richard H. Dana, Jr., one of its charter members) was in sympathy with the so-called Oxford Movement, begun a few years before in England. The character and position of its founders, and the Catholic and reverent nature of its practices, could not be overlooked, and a deep impression was made upon the city, though so largely Socinian in its religion. Dr. Holmes, himself a lifelong Unitarian, expressed the sentiment of the community in one of his classic essays, describing the

venture of faith under the pseudonym of the "Church of St. Polycarp."

"For this was a church with open doors, with seats for all classes and all colors alike a church of zealous worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and women; one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors. In its mode of worship there was a union of two qualities — the taste and refinement, which the educated require just as much in their churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp, which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its effect upon those who think they hold outward form as of little value."

Grafton became interested in the church at a time when it attracted special sympathy through the persecution it was enduring at the hands of the Ordinary, who refused to visit it again in consequence of his disapproval of some trifling details in the arrangement of the service, which he had noticed at his first confirmation in the parish. The saintly character of the rector, the Rev. William Croswell, known to him in childhood as rector of Christ Church, impressed the young man, who had been deeply moved in spiritual things at an age when too many -hearing the Voice, as they so often do refuse to listen to it. He was present at the first service in the church in Green Street.

The Rev. Oliver S. Prescott joined the parish as an assistant in October, 1849, and became a friend and counsellor. Hudson, the Shakespearian scholar, who had been ordained to the diaconate, was also

connected with the Advent, and his powerful and studious mind was not without influence on his young hearer.

On May 18, 1851, the Fourth Sunday after Easter, Grafton was confirmed at St. Stephen's Chapel, whither the Advent candidates marched in procession to meet the Bishop, headed by their rector; the last occasion for this extraordinary performance, which the Bishop's attitude made necessary. A canon procured from the General Convention obliged the Bishop to resume his episcopal functions in the parish thereafter, but the rector, whose delicate constitution had been wrecked by the persecution he had suffered, was never again to shepherd his faithful flock. Grafton was in the church on the memorable occasion, November 9, 1851, when, as Dr. Croswell was kneeling at the altar, "about the time of the evening sacrifice, the angel touched him." Though so young a man, Grafton was appointed as a member of the committee of the parish, with five of its leading officials and parishioners, to go to New Haven as an escort and to attend the burial service there.

In 1851 Grafton entered the Harvard Law School. While there an incident occurred which he has related and which was in the end helpful to him. He became greatly puzzled over certain legal principles which were laid down in the textbook, and could not see his way to a correct solution of a case before him. It rather depressed him, as he thought he must be wanting in sufficient acuteness for the profession. So he summoned up his courage and de

termined to carry the matter to Chief Justice Parker, his professor, who was one of the great lights of the legal profession. Grafton remembers with what timidity he rapped at the door, and was ushered into "the presence." He told the professor he had a legal difficulty which he could not solve. "State the case, Mr. Grafton," the professor said. So it was stated at length, with the pros and cons of the conflicting sides, and Mr. Grafton awaited the dictum of the Chief Justice. His quiet and semi-amused expression was never forgotten and his words conveyed a valuable lesson when Professor Parker said: "I am old enough and have lived long enough to tell you I don't know what the law is in the case!" Grafton recalls the relief it was to hear the supreme arbiter say this. The student was not the "fool" he had thought himself, and went out with a more courageous heart to take up his studies again.

During this period the spiritual combat and conquest were going on in Grafton's soul. He began to form habits of religious observance, he acquired a belief in the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, and he used to walk to Boston from Cambridge to make his fasting Communion. Our Church had hardly begun to wake from its apathetic condition. It was obvious to him that the low church position, then so generally held, was but a partial one, and that the Catholicity of our own branch of the Church was the only true basis of its claims. At this time there was a drawing to a political career. The anti-slavery cause commended itself greatly through