the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."

The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.