LONG time ago, there were in England, as well as in many other countries, certain pious men and women who, for their eminent wisdom, charitable works, or lives of purity and usefulness, came to be called Saints.

Among these was a Saxon monk, the Abbot of Ikanho, St. Botolph by name, who lived about the middle of the seventh century.

Botolph belonged to a noble English family. After having been educated at one of the religious houses in what was then called Belgic Gaul, he came back to England, and begged of King Ethelmund a barren spot on which to build a monastery; and here, on the Witham River, near the eastern coast of England, in what is now called Lincolnshire, he built his priory, and founded a town to which was given the name, St. Botolph’s Town.

Here is what an unknown poet says of it in Longfellow’s Poems of Places:

Now as the English people have a queer way of shortening names, as the years go on, that reminds one of the riddle:

In process of time old St. Botolph’s Town became reduced to simply Boston.[A]

So now you see that that “echo in another hemisphere” of St. Botolph’s Town is, of course, the name of our own Boston, so called by its early English settlers in memory of the English Boston they had left behind them; though, as those of you who have read Higginson’s History know, it had at first borne the name of Trimountain, because of its three hills; its Indian name having been Mushauwomuck, shortened, English fashion, to Shawmut. Boston school-boys, never forget that the original Indian name meant Free-country, or Free-land!

The name Botolph means “Boat-help;” and so, in those old times St. Botolph came to be deemed the patron saint of mariners; and as both Bostons are commercial cities by the sea, it is eminently appropriate that they should bear the old Boat-helper’s name. Perhaps, too, that is why “Simon Kempthorn, Mariner,” in Longfellow’s New England Tragedy of John Endicott, cries out, when a fire is kindled in Boston’s Market Place, in the year 1656, to burn the religious books of the persecuted Quakers:

(Would not that quotation make a capital motto for a Boston Fire Company!)

The English Boston has a high church-tower, one of the most beautiful in England,

It resembles the tower of Antwerp Cathedral, and is crowned by a beautiful octagonal lantern, that can be seen forty miles off. It serves, therefore, as a landmark for seamen.

Another poet in Poems of Places says:

For the Reverend John Cotton, one of Boston’s earliest ministers, came from Boston, England; and it is of him that “Norton” says, in the Tragedy of John Endicott:

And now I have to tell you of what seems to me a pleasing and surprising coincidence:

In the Catholic calendar each saint has his special day; thus, you know we have St. Valentine’s Day, on Feb. 14th, when you send the pretty valentines; St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th, when our Irish citizens march in processions, “wearing of the green;” St. John’s Day, June 24th, when the Canadians among us make wreaths and garlands of the fresh young maple-leaves, because the maple is the Canadian emblem. Now it so happens that St. Botolph’s Day is, of all days in the year for the American Boston’s patron saint—what do you think? The Seventeenth of June!

That Seventeenth of June, when Boston puts on her very best gala dress, when the bells all ring, and the Fire Companies form into processions, and the Military march, and the orators make speeches, and the children sing, and the great organ makes grand patriotic music, and the stars and stripes are flung to the “Boston east-winds,” and the holiday is a jolly day!

Now do not you agree with me that we have found a delightful triple coincidence, in that Boston’s great holiday is Bunker Hill Day; and Bunker Hill Day is the Seventeenth of June; and the Seventeenth of June is old St. Botolph’s Day?