Fine old French and Spanish ones
they are; some thirty of them names of Saints, all well-sounding and
pleasant to the ear. And there is a value in these names not at first
perceptible. Most of them serve to mark the day of the year upon which
the town was founded. They are commemorative dates, which one need only
look at the calendar to verify. As an instance of this, there is the
forgotten title of Lake George, Lake St. Sacrament, which, in spite of
Dr. Cleveland Coxe's very graceful ballad, we must hold to have been
conferred because the lake was discovered on Corpus-Christi Day. In the
Mississippi Valley, the great chain of French military occupation can
still be faintly traced, like the half-obliterated lines of a redoubt
which the plough and the country road have passed over.
There remain about two thousand names, which may fairly be called of
American manufacture. We exclude, of course, those which were
transferred from England, since they were probably brought directly.
They have a certain fitness, as affectionate memorials of the Old
Country lingering in the hearts of the exiles. Thus, though St. Botolph
was of the fenny shire of Lincoln, and the new comers to the
Massachusetts Bay named their little peninsula Suffolk, the county of
the "South-folk," we do not quarrel with them for calling their future
city "Bo's or Botolph's town," out of hearts which did not wholly
forget their birthplace with its grand old church, whose noble tower
still looks for miles away over the broad levels toward the German
Ocean.
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