‘As bad news always flies fast, I suppose you may have heard, that my father was taken up and obliged to give bail in £ 2000 to stand trial for (as was said) having seduced artificers. It was not the case, but as follows:—Three tradesmen came to him and asked how their business would answer in America. He very candidly told them. They wished him to advance them money to take them over but he told them it was of no service to him their going over, but if it was and he should do it he would be liable to 500 fine and twelve months imprisonment. About three months after, one of these fellows took it into his head to lodge information against my father for which he stood trial and was honorably acquitted. The jury did not leave their box.’ ( Columbian Centinel, 23 Aug. 1794.)
In 1666, on the second of September, a fire broke out on Fish street hill in London which burnt over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven parish churches, six chapels, the Royal Exchange, Custom House, Guildhall, and other public buildings, among them fifty-two halls of the London Trade companies.
To commemorate this disaster Christopher Wren designed a column known as the Monument, which was built of Portland stone two hundred and two feet high and fifteen feet in diameter. During the eighteenth century it was used for astronomical purposes, but it was found that it vibrated, and the alarm was so great, about 1795, that tradition states that while in Great Britain Lemuel Cox was approached by the Corporation of the City of London to take down the structure as being unsafe, but his price being too high the shaft still stands as one of the sights of London.
[To be continued.]
