improved much faster than Virginia, and in Seven or Eight Years New
Plymouth, like Switzerland, seemd too narrow a Territory for its
Inhabitants."[14]

Those early New Englanders may have been frugal and industrious, giving
no scandal nor bad example; but the constant repression, the monotony,
the dreariness of the religion often wrought havoc with the sensitive
nerves of the women, and many of them needed, far more than prayers,
godly counsel and church trials, the skilled services of a physician.
Two incidents related by Winthrop should be sufficient to impress the
pathos or the down-right tragedy of the situation:

"A cooper's wife of Hingham, having been long in a sad melancholic
distemper near to phrensy, and having formerly attempted to drown her
child, but prevented by God's gracious providence, did now again take an
opportunity.... And threw it into the water and mud ... She carried the
child again, and threw it in so far as it could not get out; but then it
pleased God, that a young man, coming that way, saved it. She would give
no other reason for it, but that she did it to save it from misery, and
with that she was assured, she had sinned against the Holy Ghost, and
that she could not repent of any sin. Thus doth Satan work by the
advantage of our infirmities, which would stir us up to cleave the more
fast to Christ Jesus, and to walk the more humbly and watchfully in all
our conversation."

"Dorothy Talby was hanged at Boston for murdering her own daughter a
child of three years old. She had been a member of the church of Salem,
and of good esteem for goodliness, but, falling at difference with her
husband, through melancholy or spiritual delusions, she sometime
attempted to kill him, and her children, and herself, by refusing