he turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted the staff that
has become a needful support to his old age? Here comes old Mr. Norris,
our venerable minister. Will they doff their hats, and pay reverence to
him? No: their hats stick fast to their ungracious heads, as if they
grew there; and--impious varlets that they are, and worse than the
heathen Indians!--they eye our reverend pastor with a peculiar scorn,
distrust, unbelief, and utter denial of his sanctified pretensions, of
which he himself immediately becomes conscious; the more bitterly
conscious, as he never knew nor dreamed of the like before.

But look yonder! Can we believe our eyes? A Quaker woman, clad in
sackcloth, and with ashes on her head, has mounted the steps of the
meeting-house. She addresses the people in a wild, shrill voice,--wild
and shrill it must be to suit such a figure,--which makes them tremble
and turn pale, although they crowd open-mouthed to hear her. She is bold
against established authority; she denounces the priest and his steeple-
house. Many of her hearers are appalled; some weep; and others listen
with a rapt attention, as if a living truth had now, for the first time,
forced its way through the crust of habit, reached their hearts, and
awakened them to life. This matter must be looked to; else we have
brought our faith across the seas with us in vain; and it had been better
that the old forest were still standing here, waving its tangled boughs
and murmuring to the sky out of its desolate recesses, instead of this
goodly street, if such blasphemies be spoken in it.

So thought the old Puritans. What was their mode of action may be partly
judged from the spectacles which now pass before your eyes. Joshua
Buffum is standing in the pillory. Cassandra Southwick is led to prison.
And there a woman, it is Ann Coleman,--naked from the waist upward, and
bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main Street at the