[Douglas G. Brown]

I first heard this while I was in 5th or 6th grade, which is 1961- 1962. My grandmother would occasionally recite it, as well as the Lizzie Borden quatrain. I heard it numerous times in school until I graduated. Always with L3 as Jerome stated.

State of Mainers like to mildly dump on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which this state seperated from in 1820, as the other half of the Missouri Compromise.

In my county (Waldo), probably half of the natives have some Mayflower ancestry. In Primary school, we learned that most of the Boston Brahmins were Johnnie come latelys, who came over in the great Puritan migration of the 1630's. I think the Cabots were in the paint business, and the Lowells were in textiles, but they were both old money by 1900 or so. So, this verse got drilled into our little heads early on. I don't recall it as a song lyric, mainly because I paid little attention to folk songs,

But, by the time I was in junior high school, I realized that Mayflower ancestry and ten cents would buy a person a cup of coffee. Plenty of the poor relatives of the Brahmins have been packed off to Maine over the centuries, too. Delanos who live in trailers, Coffins who are carpenters, and the like.

I've seen it in numerous anthologies over the years; but most anthologies I look at were published prior to 1970. I'm surprised that it is known by so many of the respondents here. I always thought it merely New England thing.

Another nice New England poem is the "Wants of Man", by President John Quincy Adams ( I think ... perhaps it was his father).

Anyway, it will be fun to see a treatment of the Cabot-Lowell verse in Light