multitude, forming a strong minority to the sober descendants of the
Puritans. Then, there were the slaves, contributing their dark shade to
the picture of society. The consequence of all this was a great variety
and singularity of action and incident, many instances of which might be
selected from these columns, where they are told with a simplicity and
quaintness of style that bring the striking points into very strong
relief. It is natural to suppose, too, that these circumstances affected
the body of the people, and made their course of life generally less
regular than that of their descendants. There is no evidence that the
moral standard was higher then than now; or, indeed, that morality was so
well defined as it has since become. There seem to have been quite as
many frauds and robberies, in proportion to the number of honest deeds;
there were murders, in hot-blood and in malice; and bloody quarrels over
liquor. Some of our fathers also appear to have been yoked to unfaithful
wives, if we may trust the frequent notices of elopements from bed and
board. The pillory, the whipping-post, the prison, and the gallows, each
had their use in those old times; and, in short, as often as our
imagination lives in the past, we find it a ruder and rougher age than
our own, with hardly any perceptible advantages, and much that gave life
a gloomier tinge. In vain we endeavor to throw a sunny and joyous air
over our picture of this period; nothing passes before our fancy but a
crowd of sad-visaged people, moving duskily through a dull gray
atmosphere. It is certain that winter rushed upon them with fiercer
storms than now, blocking up the narrow forest-paths, and overwhelming
the roads along the sea-coast with mountain snow drifts; so that weeks
elapsed before the newspaper could announce how many travellers had
perished, or what wrecks had strewn the shore. The cold was more
piercing then, and lingered further into the spring, making the chimney-
corner a comfortable seat till long past May-day. By the number of such
accidents on record, we might suppose that the thunder-stone, as they