Rambles about Portsmouth. Sketches of persons, localities, and incidents of two centuries: principally from tradition and unpublished documents. By Charles W. Brewster.

TOPPIN MAXWELL. 303
and, suiting the action to the word, roared out, "There!
(with an oath -too big to put in print,) see if I can't stop ye!"
Down went the crowbear among the teeth-round went
the mill one whole turn, swallowing the crowbar, and bending the strong iron like a piece of cap wire-but the meat
was too hard to digest, and like the Baylonish Dragon after
eating the pitch, the mill burst asunder. The shaft broke,
one or two fans broke and fell off, and every thing came up
with a jerk. One grand crash and all was still-so still that
it never moved again. All hands slept soundly that night,
and for all the noise made by the mill, they might have
slept tillthis time. This was Toppin's last scheme. He
went back to the horse mill; backward in many of his
affairs; and without living to be very old or very rich, he
some forty years since passed off the stage. Peace to his
ashes; he made room for greater men-we were going to
say wiser, but let that pass. Corporations which he never
heard of, machines and inventions he never dreampt of,
occupy his old tanner's paradise. A steam mill made of
his house has since ground bark where his wind-mill broke
down-a steam tannery now does in a week what he used to
do in a year-steam cotton mills are planted on the
shores of his pond-the pond itself is cut up with a multitude of railroad tracks-the telegraph near by speaks of
new things-and old men and old things are rapidly forgotten.
This biography is written merely for the love of the
thing-no chick nor child nor friend of Toppin is there left
to reward the writer for giving their relative a good character,-nor foes, that we wot of, to exult over a bad onebut hundreds of men in middle life there are, who can see
his round, rosy face, and portly bulk once again, as in a
glass-and then, perhaps, think of him no more. But then
lie had his uses, his aims, his purposes, his thought and
life-and who can say that such an one as he had no place