10 FEBRUARY 1894, Page 17

"LINKS WITH THE PAST."

[To THE EDITOR OP TEE " SPECTATOR:] Sin,—Chief Justice Shaw, of Massachusetts, who died in 1861, aged more than eighty, used to say that in his boyhood he conversed with a man who had conversed with Peregrine White, the first white child born in New England, and who lived to a very great age. That is to say, a man died in 1861 who had conversed with a man who, in his turn, had con- versed with a man born in 1620, and who was nearly thirty years of age at the time of the murder of Charles 1.—I