Extract from an address by Prof. Charles Eliot Norton at a meeting of
the Cambridge (Mass.) Historical Society, October 30, 1905: “But even a
greater change than that from country village to suburban town has taken
place here in Old Cambridge in the last seventy years. The people have
changed. In my boyhood the population was practically all of New England
origin, and in large proportion Cambridge-born, and inheritors of Old
Cambridge traditions. The fruitful invasion of barbarians had not begun.
The foreign-born people could be counted up on the fingers. There was
Rule, the excellent Scotch gardener, who was not without points of
resemblance to Andrew Fairservice; there was Sweetman, the one Irish
day-laborer, faithful and intelligent, trained as a boy in one of the
‘hedge-schools’ of his native Ireland, and ready to lean on his spade
and put the troublesome schoolboy to a test on the Odes of Horace, or
even on the _Arma virumque cano_; and at the heart of the village was
the hair-cutter, Marcus Reamie, from some unknown foreign land, with his
shop full, in a boy’s eyes, of treasures, some of his own collecting,
some of them brought from distant romantic parts of the world by his
sailor son. There were doubtless other foreigners, but I do not recall
them, except a few teachers of languages in the college, of whom three
filled in these and later years an important place in the life of the
town,—Dr. Beck, Dr. Follen and Mr. Sales.”