termed it, fell oftener and deadlier on steeples, dwellings, and
unsheltered wretches. In fine, our fathers bore the brunt of more raging
and pitiless elements than we. There were forebodings, also, of a more
fearful tempest than those of the elements. At two or three dates, we
have stories of drums, trumpets, and all sorts of martial music, passing
athwart the midnight sky, accompanied with the--roar of cannon and rattle
of musketry, prophetic echoes of the sounds that were soon to shake the
land. Besides these airy prognostics, there were rumors of French fleets
on the coast, and of the march of French and Indians through the
wilderness, along the borders of the settlements. The country was
saddened, moreover, with grievous sicknesses. The small-pox raged in
many of the towns, and seems, though so familiar a scourge, to have been
regarded with as much affright as that which drove the throng from Wall
Street and Broadway at the approach of a new pestilence. There were
autumnal fevers too, and a contagious and destructive throat-distemper,--
diseases unwritten in medical hooks. The dark superstition of former
days had not yet been so far dispelled as not to heighten the gloom of
the present times. There is an advertisement, indeed, by a committee of
the Legislature, calling for information as to the circumstances of
sufferers in the "late calamity of 1692," with a view to reparation for
their losses and misfortunes. But the tenderness with which, after above
forty years, it was thought expedient to allude to the witchcraft
delusion, indicates a good deal of lingering error, as well as the
advance of more enlightened opinions. The rigid hand of Puritanism might
yet be felt upon the reins of government, while some of the ordinances
intimate a disorderly spirit on the part of the people. The Suffolk
justices, after a preamble that great disturbances have been committed by
persons entering town and leaving it in coaches, chaises, calashes, and
other wheel-carriages, on the evening before the Sabbath, give notice
that a watch will hereafter be set at the "fortification-gate," to