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 Sketches of persons, localities, and incidents of two centuries: principally from tradition and unpublished documents.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

304 RAMBLES ABOUT PORTSMOUTH.
in the divine and beneficent plans of the great overruling
Providence, or that he did not fill it? If any think or say
so let them do it better.
A character, quite as prominent on the shores of the
North Mill Pond, has furnished the subject for another
sketch from the same writer. We refer to Commodore
Mifflin.
The title was honorary or fanciful, but the name was
real, and Mr. Mifflin lived and labored in Portsmouth
through a long life and died something more than forty
years ago.
He lived in Rock Pasture. Well, where's that? No
where, now; because the Rocks are gone, and the pasture
also, for though the land remains, it is now cut up into
streets and squares, occupied with houses, shops, mills
and iron works. But Rock Pasture did extend, in Commodore Mifflin's day, from where the west end of the Portsmonth Steam Factory now stands, to the westerly side of
Cabot street, and from Islington street to the North Mill
Pond.
On the bank of this pond stood the Mifflin mansion,
on the spot where is the house and former home of Capt.
Robert Shillaber, and close to the Partington estate: for
strange as it may seem, be it known to the moderns, that
while the middle of the pasture was bare of buildings, the
water lots, or rather mud lots, on the shore, were all occupied by houses, from the Partington mansion down to'Squire Adams's wharf.
On the pond swam and fished Mr. Mifflin's geese, that
healthy, vigorous, never-failing flock, whose memory is
honored in a poem of Benj. P. Shillaber, the medium
through whom the Partington spirit's utterances are given
to the sons of earth.
And they fed, as they listed, on the green grass which
carpeted the moist even surface of the pasture, during the