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Old Nova Scotia in 1783
Fragments of an Unpublished Story
N the ancient town of Rowley, near the north-east corner of the old Province of Massachusetts Bay, there was born, in the year 1731, a boy who was destined to experience more vicissitudes of fortune than fall to the lot of ordinary mortals. His name was Jacob Bailey.
The surroundings of his childhood were not inspiring. He writes:
When I had completed my tenth year, I found myself an inhabitant of a place remarkable for its ignorance, narrowness of mind and bigotry. An uniform mode of thinking and acting prevailed, and nothing could be more criminal than for one person to be more learned, religious or polite than another. * * Every man planted as many acres of Indian corn and sowed the same number with rye; he ploughed with as many oxen, hoed it as often, and gathered in his crop on the same day with his grandfather. He salted down the same quantity of beef and pork, wore the same kind of stockings, and at table sat and said grace with his wife and children around him, just as his predecessors had done before him.
Rev. Jedediah Jewett, pastor of the Congregational church in Rowley, was the friend and patron of young Jacob Bailey, and is entitled to the credit of taking an almost friendless young man from his obscurity and placing within his reach the opportunity of acquiring a college education. He entered Harvard in 1751, at the age of twenty years. Among his classmates were John Adams, the second president of the United States, and Sir John Wentworth, afterwards governor of New Hampshire, and later of Nova Scotia.
After five years spent as a schoolmaster, Jacob Bailey decided to enter the ministry, and in January, 1760, em-
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