have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or
family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I
brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me."
Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to
have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could
bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase
for a model female,--"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of
the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old
gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate
love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an
"ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means
a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and
prayer to wean him at last.

He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat
strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard
at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the
general recommendation of her," and the college students were greatly
delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691,
wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in
manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats
of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.
She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of
his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes
formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous
theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to
infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in
hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if
he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little
heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart