REHOBOTH and ATTLEBORO. 227

poets, our Newman bestowed in compiling his concordances of the Sacred Scriptures; and the incomparable relish which the Sacred Scriptures had with him, while he had them thus under his continual rumination, was as well a mean as a sign of his arriving to an extraordinary measure of that sanctity, which the truth produces. But of his family discipline there was no part more notable than this one; that once a year he kept a solemn day of humiliation with his family, and once a year a day of thanksgiving; and on these days he would not only enquire of his household what they had met withal to be humbled, or to be thankful for, but also he would recruit the memoirs of his diary."

Mather prints a fragment of his diary. Newman's famous Concordance, prepared here in the wilderness, has properly been called a Herculean labor.  It was the third in English ever published and greatly superior to his two predecessors.  The first edition was published in London in 1643, just before Newman's removal from Weymouth to Rehoboth.  At Rehoboth, he revised and greatly improved it, using in the evening , according to President Stiles, pine knots instead of candles.  The revised edition was published at London in 1650.

On the fourteenth of June, 1644, the tract was adopted into the jurisdiction of Plymouth Colony, and incorporated as Rehoboth.  The word, as is well known, is from the Hebrew, meaning a broad way; and the settlers chose it signifying that the Lord had opened a way for them.  A second purchase was shortly after made from Wamsutta, another chief, who was sometimes called Alexander.  He was a son of Massasoit and an elder brother of Philip.  This second tract formed part of Wannamoisett, or Swansea, and of Barrington. A third purchase was made in 1661, and is known as the North Purchase.  It comprised the present towns of Attleboro and North Attleboro, Mass. and Cumberland, R. I. and parts of Mansfield and Norton, Mass.  This purchase was made by Thomas Willett, the successor of Miles Standish as captain of the noted Plymouth military company, and who afterward became the first English mayor of New York.  Willett and Mr. Myles, the first Baptist minister in New England, were the founders of Swansea.  in 1665, Willett was given by the town of Rehoboth five hundred acres of land in the North Purchase, situated on both sides of Seven Mile River, beginning at Newell's tavern.  He died August 4, 1674, at Swansea, where his