the General Court that each congregation should carry a 'competent number
of pieces, fixed and complete with powder and shot and swords, every
Lord's-day at the meeting-house?' And, right well equipped 'with
psalm-book, shot and powder-horn' sat that doughty man, Shear Yashub
Millard along with Hezekiah Bristol and four others whose issue I have
known pleasantly in the flesh here; and those of us who had no pieces wore
'coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
arrows.' Yet it bethought me that there was no defence against what I had
devoured on Christmas day. I had rather been the least of these,--even he
who 'blew the Kunk'--than to be thus seated there and afeared that the
brethren in the 'pitts' doubted I had true religion. That I had found a
proper seat--even this I wot not; and I quaked, for had not two of my kin
been fined near unto poverty for 'disorderly going and setting in seats
not theirs by any means,' so great was their sin. It had not yet come upon
the day when there was a 'dignifying of the meeting.' Did not even the
pious Judge Sewall's second spouse once sit in the foreseat when he
thought to have taken her into 'his own pue?' and, she having died in a
few months, did not that godly man exclaim: 'God in his holy Sovereignity
put my wife out of the Foreseat'? Was I not also in recollection by many
as one who once 'prophaned the Lord's Day in ye meeting-house, in ye times
of ye forenoone service, by my rude and Indecent acting in Laughing and
other Doings by my face with Tabatha Morgus, against ye peace of our
Sovereign Lord ye King, His crown and Dignity?'"

At this, it appears that I groaned in my sleep, for I was not only asleep
here and now, but I was dreaming that I was asleep there and then, in the
meeting-house. It was in this latter sleep that I groaned so heavily in
spirit and in body that the tithing-man, or awakener, did approach me from
behind, without stopping to brush me to awakening by the fox-taile which
was fixed to the end of his long staffe, or even without painfully