sturdy farmers, who
tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own
produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the
necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands. A slender
population was scattered far asunder in lonely townships and straggling
villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable
fashion imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the
attacks of Indians. Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of
the Puritan days still persisted. The stocks and the pillory and the
stool of repentance were things of the present. A shrewish housewife
might still be made to stand at her cottage door with {76} the iron gag
of the scold fastened upon her shameful face. A careless Sabbatarian
might still find himself exposed to the scorn of a congregation, with
the words "A wanton gospeller" placarded upon his ignominious breast.
Inside those wooden houses a rude simplicity and a rough plenty
prevailed. The fare was simple; the labor was hard; simple fare and
stern labor between them reared a stalwart, God-fearing race. Its
positive pleasures were few and primitive. Husking-bees, quiltings, a
rare dance, filled up the measure of its diversions. But the summer
smiled upon those steadfast, earnest, rigorous citizens, and in the
wild and bitter winters each household would gather about the cheerful
fire in the great chimney which in some of those cottages formed the
major part of the building, and find content and peace in quiet talk
and in tales of the past, of the French and Indian wars, and of their
ancestors, long ago, in old England. Those same great fires that were
the joy of winter were also one of its troubles. Once lit, with all
the difficulty attendant upon flint and steel and burnt rag, they had
to be kept alight from morning till night and from night till morning.
If a fire went out it was a woful business to start it again with the
reluctant tinder-box. There was, indeed, another way, an easier way,
of going round to a neighbor and borrowing a shovelful of hot embers
wherewith to kindle the blackened hearth. But in villages built for
the most part of wood this might well be regarded as a dangerous
process. So the law did regard it, and to start a fire in this lazy,
lounging fashion was penalized as sternly as any breach of the Sabbath
or of public decorum, and these were sternly punished. Drunkenness was
grimly frowned down. Only