"
The situation was beautiful, and home attachments proved
tenacious, the family claim to the farm having only been resigned
within the last thirty or forty years.
I am proud of my unlettered forefathers, who were also too humbly
proud to care whether their names would be remembered or not; for
they were God-fearing men, and had been persecuted for their
faith long before they found their way either to Old or New
England.
The name is rather an unusual one, and has been traced back from
Wales and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Pied-
mont; a little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in
what was probably the original spelling-La Combe. There is a
family shield in existence, showing a hill surmounted by a tree,
and a bird with spread wings above. It might symbolize flight in
times of persecution, from the mountains to the forests, and
thence to heaven, or to the free skies of this New World.
But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both
indifferent and ignorant as to questions of pedigree, and
accepted with sturdy dignity an inheritance of hard work and the
privileges of poverty, leaving the same bequest to their
descendants.
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