so brought him (sometimes sitting and sometimes hanging down) to Boston,
being five miles off, to the magistrates, and by the way the boy calling
much for water, would give him none, though he came close by it, so as
the boy was near dead when he came to Boston, and died within a few hours
after."

Winthrop relates how Franklin appealed the case when he was found guilty,
and how the Puritans inflicted the death penalty on him after searching the
_Bible_ for a rule on which to base their decision. The most noticeable
qualities of this terrible story are its simplicity, its repression, its
lack of striving after effect. Winthrop, Bradford, and Bunyan had learned
from the 1611 version of the _Bible_ to be content to present any situation
as simply as possible and to rely on the facts themselves to secure the
effect.

Winthrop's finest piece of prose, _Concerning Liberty,_ appears in an entry
for the year 1645. He defines liberty as the power "to do that which is
good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard,
not only of your goods, but of your lives, if need be." Winthrop saw
clearly what many since his day have failed to see, that a government
conducted by the people could not endure, if liberty meant more than this.

Winthrop's _Journal_ records almost anything which seemed important to the
colonists. Thus, he tells about storms, fires, peculiar deaths of animals,
crimes, trials, Indians, labor troubles, arrival of ships, trading
expeditions, troubles with England about the charter, politics, church
matters, events that would point a moral, like the selfish refusal of the
authorities to loan a quantity of gunpowder to the Plymouth colony and the
subsequent destruction of that same powder by an explosion, or the drowning
of a child in the well while the parents were visiting on Sunday. In short,