wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a
considerable part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how
entirely this source of discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the
path of the clergy; and it is painful to think that there ever was a
period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy the delineation of their
own sins.

However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of
rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine
could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse
likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own
sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great
trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
1677,--not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors
are,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two
different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that
day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries
are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society
at Worcester,--without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse,
the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man
was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good
beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it
was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"--so that
the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;--and the
Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put
the minister's grounds in order.

Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev.
Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,--"Much ado I