The provincial councillors of Pennsylvania : who held office between 1733-1776, and those earlier councillors who were some time chief magistrates of the province and their descendants, Part 2

Author: Keith, Charles Penrose, 1854-1939
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Philadelphia
Number of Pages: 646


USA > Pennsylvania > The provincial councillors of Pennsylvania : who held office between 1733-1776, and those earlier councillors who were some time chief magistrates of the province and their descendants > Part 2


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49


Markham appears to have been a Churchman, and, although he never made himself obnoxious to the Quakers, was more in sympathy with the descendants of the earlier emigrants sent hither by Queen Christina of Sweden, the burgomasters of Amsterdam, or the Duke of York. With several of the Delaware Councillors, he supported Blackwell against Lloyd and his partisans. When Penn afterwards offered the Council the choice between a Lieutenant-Governor and five Commissioners, he named Markham among the latter, and expressed his own preference for such a government. A separa- tion taking place between the Province and the Lower Counties, Penn appointed Markham Lieutenant-Governor of the latter. He held this position about two years, Fletcher's arrival, April 26, 1693, uniting both Pennsylvania and what is now Delaware to New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The former dominion of Penn, however, was allowed a separate Council and Lieutenant- Governor. Thomas Lloyd declining the first place at this Council, Fletcher conferred it upon Markham, and on April 27, with the unanimous consent of the Council, appointed him Lieutenant-Gov- ernor. From about this time he, is called " Colonel." Within two years, the King and Queen restored the government to Penn, and Penn


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Markham.


commissioned Markham his Lieutenant-Governor with John Goodson and Samuel Carpenter as Assistants. Markham accordingly remained at the head of the Colony until the arrival of the Proprietary the second time in America, at the end of the year 1699. This period was the high day of piracy on the American coast, the time of Cap- tain Kidd. Much of the trade in the sea-port towns was in ill-gotten goods, and the cupidity of the adventurers who held the offices for the execution of the laws bound them to the pirates. Governor Fletcher licensed vessels sailing from New York with piratical designs. Edw. Randolph, Surv. Gen. of Customs, accused Markham of conniving at piracy, and wrote that certain well known pirates had been seen in Philadelphia, and Markham had paid no attention to the Lords' pro- clamations, had neglected to prosecute forfeited bonds, had adjourned the courts, to the benefit of fraudulent debtors. Some months later, when a piratical craft had come into Delaware Bay, taken nine or ten ships, and committed several robberies on the people of Pennsylvania, Markham applied to the Earl of Bellomont for a man-of-war to guard the Bay, but none were at that officer's disposal. Certain offenders being found in town, and pointed out to him, he made several arrests. Although the Province contained at least 7000 men capable of bearing arms, he was a weak governor at such times for want of a militia. This crying need of the Province was forced upon Penn's attention by the Lords of Trade, and some years later several companies of soldiers were formed.


Markham bought Jasper Yeates's house on Front St. in Philadel- phia, and resided in it until his death. Penn sent a warrant to Lt. Gov. Hamilton to appoint Markham Register-General of Wills, in pursuance of which he was so commissioned 5, 27, 1703. John Moore, the former Register, withholding the seal of the office, Mark- ham was authorized by the Council to use his private seal. Moore contested the legality of Markham's appointment, and before the mat- ter was decided, Markham died in Phila. June 12, 1704. Although Penn had expressed dissatisfaction at various things done by him as Commissioner of Property, yet Logan, in his letter of 4 mo. 12, 1704, says, " Poor, honest, Col. Markham this morning ended a miserable life by a seasonable release in a fit of his old distemper that seized his vitals." He had a military funeral, the militia turning out, as Logan also writes, to bury him " very honorably, like a soldier." He mar- ried at least twice. The wife who survived him was named Joanna. She was not the mother of Markham's only child. When he mar-


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Markham.


ried her, she was a widow with one daughter, Elizabeth, who m., 1st, Edward Robinson of Phila., merchant, whose will was probat. Nov. 4, 1699, and, 2nd, Jacob Regnier of Lincoln's Inn, barrister-at-law, and d. s. p. before Aug. 3, 1715. The widow Markham removed to New York City, where she died Oct. 4, 1726.


Issue :


ANN, d. after 1733, Logan, in a letter of Aug. 11, 1734, writ- ing that he had read " Brown's," and that she was certainly " a base woman to dispute facts so clear," it appearing that she claimed a quantity of land bought by Markham, but which he left to his wife, and the latter conveyed to her nephew, Theodore Colby. Logan adds, " his aunt gave him a firm title for the land, and it was absolutely his." Davis's Hist. of Bucks Co. says that, in pity for her distresses, an allowance was made to her. She m. between 1690 and 1698 James Brown, who is spoken of in Edward Randolph's letter of Apr. 26, 1698, as a pirate married to Lt. Gov. Markham's daughter. He appears to have been twice taken up for piracy, being acquitted the first time. In 1699, while a Member of Assembly from Kent Co., he was taken with some of the pirate Avery's men, and brought to Philadel- phia, and by the advice of the Council was sent to the Earl of Bellomont at Boston. The latter wrote, May 25, 1700, that he was much solicited to set Brown at liberty, but did not feel free to do so. With eight other culprits he was accordingly sent to England, under charge of Admiral Ben- bow (Doc. Hist. N. Y.). It would seem that he met a felon's death, as his wife a few years later is called a widow.


Issue (surname BROWN) :


WILLIAM, d. s. p. before Dec. 19, 1726,


JAMES, d. s. p. before Dec. 19, 1726,


JOANNA, who on Dec. 19, 1726, as "Joanna Brown of the city of New York only daughter of Ann Brown of the same City and granddaughter of William Markham late of the City of Phila. Esq. dec'd," sold some property devised to her and her brothers. In 1767 the Penn family granted her a pension, and in 1774 Richard Hockley, who speaks of her by no other name than "Col. Markham's granddaughter," writes, " The old gentlewoman is still alive and hearty."


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THOMAS LLOYD.


The Lloyds of Dolobran in Wales were a well known "county family ;" and Charles Lloyd, owner of that seat, and his brother Thomas Lloyd, President of the Council of Pennsylvania and the Terri- tories on Delaware, were with William Penn and Robert Barclay of Ury the chief converts to Quakerism among the gentry of Britain. The surname Lloyd was assumed in the XVIth Century by Owen, son of Ivan Teg, or Ivan the Handsome, whose family had owned Dolobran since the year 1476, and who, like most Welsh gentlemen, named a line of ancestors extending beyond the Dark Ages. The descent from Owen Lloyd is given, apparently more accurately than in Burke's Landed Gentry, in the Montgomeryshire Collections for 1876. The grandmother of President Lloyd, i. e. the wife of John Lloyd of Dolobran, gentleman, was descended from King Edward I of England in the following legitimate and, for many generations, illustrious line. Edward I's granddaughter "the Fair Maid of Kent"-she was daughter and heiress of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent,-married, 1st, Sir Thomas Holland, who received the title of Earl of Kent, and after whose death she married, 2ndly, William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and, 3rd, Edward, Prince of Wales, commonly called " the Black Prince," by whom she was mother of King Richard II. Her eldest son, Thomas Holland, who succeeded his father as Earl of Kent, and was Marshal of England, was the father of Eleanor, who m., 1st, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March,-from which marriage descended King Edward IV,-and, 2nd, Edward Cherleton, Lord Powys. Lord Powys by his marriage left co-heir- esses, one of whom, Joan, m. Sir John Grey, who in the year 1418 was created Earl of Tankerville. The Earl of Tankerville by this marriage had a son Henry, who succeeded him as Earl of Tanker- ville, a title which the family lost when Normandy was taken by the French. The male line became extinct with the death of Henry's great-grandson Edward Grey, Lord Powys, in the 5th year of the reign of Edward VI; and an inquisition found that Edward Kynas-


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Lloyd.


ton, Esq., was Lord Powys's next heir. Edward Kynaston was great- grandson of Henry, the 2nd Earl, whose daughter Elizabeth had mar- ried Roger Kynaston, Esq., leaving a son Humphrey, who was father of Edward. To this point the descent is almost public history, and when, in 1731, Edward Kynaston's male heir claimed the barony of Powys, the fact of his descent from the Earl of Tankerville was admitted. Now it was said in the Montgomeryshire Collections, Vol. IX, page 337, that Margaret Kynaston, dau. of Edward, and in Burke's Landed Gentry that Margaret Kynaston, sister of Roger (which does not conflict, for Roger was the son of Edward), married John Lloyd, or Wyn, father of Humphrey Wyn of Dyffryn : but it now appears by the better authority of the Hardwick Kynaston pedigree, published in the Montgomeryshire Collections for April, 1882, which Hon. Chas. Perrin Smith had not seen when he compiled his " Lloyd and Carpen- ter Family," that Margaret Kynaston, wife of John Wyn, or John ap Evan ap Owen, was sister, instead of daughter, of Edward Kynaston above named. She was thus granddaughter of Elizabeth Grey, whose grandmother was descended from King Edward I. Margaret Kynas- ton's son, Humphrey Wyn of Dyffryn, was father of Katharine, the wife of John Lloyd of Dolobran, and the paternal grandmother of the subject of this sketch.


Charles Lloyd of Dolobran, father of the President of the Council, was born in 1613, and was a magistrate for Montgomeryshire. He was a genealogist. and caused to be emblazoned on a panel at Dolobran his coat-of-arms with fifteen quarterings, impaled with the arms of his wife. A drawing of this was sent to the family in this country when the panel was taken down, and is as good evidence of ancestry in the female line as we could well have of any person living two cen- turies ago. On this shield the first, or paternal, arms are az. a chevron between three cocks ar .- those of the Princes of Dyfed, of whom Aleth, the sixteenth generation back of Thomas Lloyd of Penna., was living in the XIth Century, and the earliest of the line whose name is given was Meirig, said to have lived five centuries earlier. These arms are differenced by a crescent, to denote that the Dolobran Lloyds descended from a second son. To follow up all the quarterings, and show Lloyd's descent from those who bore the various arms, would lead us through a labyrinth of Welsh names suggesting nothing to the reader. Suffice it to say that some of the arms appear to have been those borne by the Poles, or ancient male line of lords of Powys, the Cherletons, Greys, and Kynastons, thus corroborating the pedigree given above.


Lloyd. (9)


The mother of Thomas Lloyd was Elizabeth, dau. of Thomas Stan- ley of Knockin, whose coat-of-arms of five quarterings Charles Lloyd impales. Its first quarter is the shield of the Earls of Derby differ- enced with a crescent charged with a crescent, which indicates that Thomas Stanley of Knockin descended from the second son of a second son.


Charles and Elizabeth Lloyd had the following children :


CHARLES, who inherited Dolobran, and was ancestor of the


Lloyd who founded Lloyd's banking house in London, JOHN, who was a Clerk in Chancery,


THOMAS, who came to Pennsylvania,


ELIZABETH, who m. Henry Parry of Penamser, Merioneth- shire.


THOMAS LLOYD was born about 1640, and was sent to Jesus Col- lege, Oxford. We are told that while there, in 1663, he became a convert to Quakerism, and forsook the " vain pursuits " of a Univer- sity course ; but the catalogue of the graduates from Oxford gives us the name : Tho. Lloyd, Jes., B. A. Jany. 29, 1661, from which we may infer that he had graduated before the date of his conversion.


The Society of Friends was now in the second decade of its history. The preaching of George Fox, its founder, began in 1647, and before the death of King Charles I, there were gathered together a few who believed in, and professed themselves wholly guided by the Inward Light. This was their fundamental principle, and the various features which are vulgarly thought to make up Quakerism, as non-resistance, refusal to take oaths, &ct., came later in the striving after a more spir- itual religion. Fox refused a commission in a company of Parlia- mentary troops, but rather because he was called to a spiritual combat, on which account he would have declined entering into trade as well, than from any scruples then felt against the shedding of blood. Clad in leathern clothes, he itinerated through the North of England calling people to repentance, like one of the prophets of old, and crying out against churches, church-yards, and tithe-taking preachers, and de- claring it a dishonoring of the Creator to take off the hat to a creature, and maintaining that Christ within him had made him free from all sin. The rural populace must have had little spirituality in their former religion, and seen little meaning in their ecclesiastical formulæ, for when he preached to them Christ indwelling in the heart of the believer, they flocked to hear it as something entirely new, and when


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Lloyd.


he attacked the outward institutions of religion, everybody was silenced. The Independents, who succeeded the Presbyterians in the magistracy, committed him to jail on the charge of blasphemy : but he made converts even among the soldiery, many of whom, scrupling to take an oath, left the army when Lord Protector Cromwell required it to swear allegiance to him. Other men and women, some of whom had not seen Fox, felt themselves called to preach the Light. In 1654, there were more than sixty preachers who could be called Quakers ; and meetings were established in the principal cities of England and Scotland. In the next year missionaries went to Ireland, Holland, and New England. In the later years of the Common- wealth, which saw the rise of a multitude of fanatical sects, the Quakers increased to great numbers. They were in harmony with the icono- clastic and levelling spirit of the age, but they also held out the hand to those who recoiled from the violence and licentiousness of the Fifth Monarchy men. No wonder, then, that at the Restoration of King Charles II, the sect numbered so many people. At first they called themselves Children of the Light. The name "Quaker " was given to Fox in derision by a justice of the peace whom he had told to "Tremble [or, rather, quake] at the presence of the Lord." The Merry Monarch was disposed to be easy upon non-belligerent pietists, who had suffered at the hands of the sects which had put his father to death. He gave audience to them, and released several from prison, and, as all know, in later times was a friend to William Penn ; but the reactionary party at Court placed or maintained upon the statute book certain laws-only one designed against Quakers particularly- whose penalties the Quakers incurred. Much persecution took place under the Act against those persons " known as Quakers or by other names of separation " who taught that it was unlawful to take an oath. Refusal by any such person to take an oath was made punishable for the first offence by fines and for subsequent offences by various pen- alties and finally transportation. In 1664, Thomas Lloyd and several others were arrested as they were travelling on the highway, and taken before a justice, by whom, in accordance with the Act, they were com- mitted to prison. The confinement in Lloyd's case at least was not close. His marriage took place while he was under the jailor's charge, and his wife was allowed to visit him. But he was not completely at liberty until King Charles II by letters patent in 1672 dispensed with the laws inflicting punishment for religious offences, when, says Besse's Sufferings of the Quakers, Charles Lloyd, Thomas Lloyd, and others


Lloyd. (11)


" were discharged out of Montgomery gaol." Thomas Lloyd became a physician, and had a large practice. He was a man of such influ- ence that, we are told in the Friend, Vol. XXVII, his solicitations induced Parliament to abolish the long unused writ de hæretico com- burendo with the application of which the Quakers had been threat- ened by their enemies. He had " many considerable offers from noted men who had power to bestow great places &ct. if he would have been prevailed on to change his religion." In the year 1681, his brother and himself held a public disputation in the town-hall at Llanvilling with Rt. Rev. William Lloyd, Bp. of St. Asaph, a man of very con- siderable learning, one of the prelates whom James II a few years later committed to the Tower.


Thomas Lloyd with his wife and children embarked at London for Pennsylvania June 10, 1683. Among the passengers on the same ship was Francis Daniel Pastorius, a scholar educated at the best schools in Germany, on his way to take charge of the lands bought of Penn by the Frankfort Company. He and Lloyd conversed in Latin, and he composed verses in praise of Lloyd's three eldest daughters. After a voyage of over two months, they arrived in Pennsylvania on the 20th of 6 mo. (August.) Among the laws agreed upon in England by Penn and the purchasers, it was provided that all conveyances of land for longer than one year, and all bills and bonds over 5l., unless payable within three months, should be registered in a public enrol- ment office. The Assembly which met at Chester in December, 1682, re-enacted this in its main features in the 44th Law of the Province. On Dec. 27, 1683, Penn established this office by the appointment of Lloyd as Master of the Rolls, to kept a fair and exact enrolment of all laws and public proceedings of justice, if not in rolls, at least in fair books. He was to hold his position during good behavior, and, as a tribute therefor, was to yield and pay to Penn and his heirs a clean and fair roll of parchment on the 1st day of 1st month in every year. This wholesome regulation of the Founder of the Province to have all important instruments recorded, was never carried out. At the end of five years, Blackwell found that none of the laws passed since Lloyd's appointment had been enrolled, and the conveyancer of the present day knows how tardily the purchasers before the recent Act of May 24, 1878, took their deeds to the Recorder. In 1688 the Assem- bly validated all the instruments then unrecorded, provided they should be brought for record within twelve months if executed out of the Province, and within six months if executed within it, and dis-



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Lloyd.


pensed with the law requiring the recording of bills and bonds. In 1693, the Assembly abolished the system by an Act declaring unre- corded deeds as valid as if they had been recorded, and ordaining for the future simply that the exemplification of the record of a deed should be as good in court as the original.


In the beginning of the 1st mo. of 1684, Lloyd was chosen a mem- ber of the Provincial Council, attesting to keep the debates secret-the only form for qualifying-on the 20th. In August, the Governor embarked for England, leaving a commission to the Council to act in his stead, with Thomas Lloyd as their President. He also appointed Lloyd Keeper of the Great Seal, and Lloyd, Robert Turner, and James Claypoole (brother of John Claypoole who m. Oliver Crom- well's daughter) Commissioners of Property, to grant warrants for surveying land, and to issue patents on the survey being duly made and returned. These commissioners acted only two years. Lloyd desiring to be relieved of office, the government by the Council was terminated 12 mo. 9, 1687-8, when there was received from Penn a commission to five persons, Lloyd, Turner, Simcock, Cook, and Eck- ley to exercise the powers of a Deputy-Governor. This arrangement lasted about ten months. Penn offered the Lieutenant-Governorship again to Lloyd, but he refused, and no other Quaker fit for it being willing to accept, Penn conferred it upon Capt. John Blackwell, then in New England, who had been Treasurer of the Army in the time of the Commonwealth, a man of high reputation for integrity, who had refused a great office in Ireland under Charles II and James II because it depended upon perquisites. He was a Puritan, and had married a daughter of General Lambert. Nathaniel Mather (Mass. Hist. Coll.) wrote of him in 1684, "For serious reall piety & nobleness of spirit, prudence, etc. I have not been acquainted with many that equall him." He arrived Dec. 17, 1688, his first act, strange to say, being the setting apart of a day for "solemn thanksgiving to Almighty God for his inestimable blessing to his Majesty's kingdoms and dominions by the birth of a Prince" (James II's unfortunate son, who had come so unwelcome to Protestant England that his parentage was impugned).


Lloyd, still Keeper of the Great Seal and Master of the Rolls, was very troublesome to Blackwell throughout his whole term of office. First, he refused to pass certain commissions under the seal. Afterwards, as he was going to New York, he was requested to leave the seal with the Council, that public business might not be obstructed, but he de- clined, declaring it out of their power to deprive a man of an office which


Lloyd. (13)


he held for life. He refused to hand over the official communications received during his presidency, although the Council resolved that all letters of instruction should be delivered to the Secretary, and such parts of other letters as gave any instructions should be copied for public use. He refused to seal the commission for a Provincial Court, declaring the document "more moulded by fancy than formed by law." Moreover, he undertook to appoint as Clerk of the Peace David Lloyd, whom the Lieut .- Governor and Council had just sus- pended for refusing to produce papers. In March, 1689, Thomas Lloyd was by Bucks Co. again elected a member of the Council, but the Lieut .- Governor proposed articles of impeachment. The Council objecting to take part in this measure, the Governor adjourned that meeting. But when they next met, Lloyd very coolly entered the room, saying he had come to take his place. The Governor said there was nothing expected of him until he answered the charges: Lloyd replied that he had as good a right to sit there as the Governor had to be Governor. As he refused to withdraw, Blackwell adjourned to his own lodgings, ordering the members to follow him. Some staid to fight it out with Lloyd; but such were the "sharp and unsavory expressions " used by the latter that Markham, the Secretary, induced the Governor to return. Lloyd was again commanded to depart, and the other members followed Blackwell. A similar scene was enacted at a subsequent meeting.


Blackwell was continuously opposed by the most important Quakers, to the chagrin of William Penn, who had thought that the high char- acter of Blackwell would make his government satisfactory to Friends, while his not being of that sect would leave him free to obey the Crown. Penn wrote to Blackwell 7 mo. 25, 1689, " I would be as little vigorous as possible ; and do desire thee, by all the obligation I and my present circumstances can have upon thee to desist ye prose- cution of T. L. I entirely know ye person both in his weakness and accomplishment, and would thee end ye dispute between you two upon my single request and command and that former inconveniences be rather mended than punished. Salute me to ye people in generall pray send for J. Simcock, A. Cook, John Eckley, and Samuel Car- penter, and let them dispose T. L. and Sa. Richardson to that com- plying temper that may tend to that loving and serious accord yt becomes such a government." In response to letters from both Black- well and his enemies, Penn relieved him of the government, and, that the Council should have no occasion for grumbling, submitted to their


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Lloyd.


choice two commissions duly signed, one authorizing the whole body to act as Blackwell's successor, they choosing a President, and the other commission permitting them to name three persons in the Prov- ince or Lower Counties, from whom Penn would choose one as Lieu- tenant-Governor, and until his mind should be known the one having most votes or being first chosen should act as such. On 11 mo. 2, 1689-90, the Council unanimously accepted the commission appoint- ing the whole body as Penn's deputy, and elected Thomas Lloyd President. On the 4th of the same month, the Council decided unani- mously that the Keeper of the Broad Seal might sit as a member ex officio of any County Court, and on the 11th of April the Clerkship of the Peace for Phila. Co. was referred to his disposal as chief officer of records. Under Lloyd's presidency, the Lower Counties became discontented. After long complaint of the delay of justice, six of their Councillors, in Nov., 1690, undertook to appoint new judges ; an act which the Council at large repudiated, promising however to appoint others, of whom a Delaware man should be president in Dela- ware. On 1 mo. 30, 1691, there were submitted for the Council's choice two new commissions, one for the Council to name three persons from whom Penn would appoint a Lieutenant-Governor, the person having most votes to act until Penn's pleasure should be known, the other for Lloyd, Markham, Turner, Jennings, and Cann or any three of them to exercise a Lieutenant-Governor's powers, and if neither com- mission were accepted, the government to remain in the whole Council. The Councillors from Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester were unani- mous for a single executive, but those from Delaware, seeing that Lloyd would be chosen, declared against it. Ten members being present, Lloyd in the chair, Growdon called out, "You that is for Thomas Lloyd, Arthur Cook, and John Goodson to be nominated Deputy-Governor stand up and say yea." Whereupon the Delaware- ans, protesting that the Charter required two-thirds as a quorum and a two-thirds vote in "affairs of moment," left the meeting. Three days later, six of them, claiming that the government was still in the Council, met at New Castle, and chose John Cann President. Lloyd, made Lieutenant-Governor until Penn's appointment should be known, accepted at the importunity of friends, and tried to win back the Delawareans, but in vain. Penn was grieved at his acting upon this " broken choice," and urged a reunion, but finally commissioned Lloyd as Lieutenant-Governor of Pennsylvania, and Markham as Lieuten- ant-Governor of the Lower Counties. This arrangement lasted until the arrival of Gov. Fletcher.




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