stocks; Indian stragglers, fair Puritan maidens,
fierce sailor-men, a pious preacher or sober magistrate--no lack of
local color in that picture.

It is interesting to note in all the colonies the attempt to exterminate
all idle folk and idle ways. The severity of the penalties were so
salutary in effect, that as Mrs. Goodwin says in her _Colonial
Cavalier_, they soon would have exterminated even that social pest, the
modern tramp. Vagrants, and those who were styled "transients," were
fiercely abhorred and cruelly spurned. I have found by comparison of
town records that they were often whipped from town to town, only to be
thrust forth in a few weeks with fresh stripes to another grudged
resting place. Such entries as this of the town of Westerly, Rhode
Island, might be produced in scores:

"September 26, 1748. That the officer shall take the said transient
forthwith to some publick place in this town and strip him from the
waist upward, & whyp him twenty strypes well layd on his naked back, and
then be by said officer transported out of this town."

The appearance of crime likewise had to be avoided. In 1635 Thomas Petet
"for suspition of slander, idleness and stubbornness is to be severely
whipt and kept in hold."

More shocking and still more summary was the punishment meted out to a
Frenchman who was _suspected_ only of setting fire to Boston in the year
1679. He was ordered to stand in the pillory, have both ears cut off,
pay the charges of the court, and lie in prison in bonds of five hundred
pounds until sentence was performed.

These Massachusetts magistrates were not the only ones to sentence
punishment on suspicion. In Scotland one Richardson, a tailor, being
"accusit of pickrie," or pilfering, was adjudged to be punished with
"twelve straiks with ane double belt, because there could be nae
sufficient proof gotten, but vehement suspition."

Writing of punishments of bygone days, an English rhymester says:

"Each mode has served its turn, and played a part
For good or ill with man; but while the bane
Of drunkenness corrupts the nation's heart--
Discrediting our age--methinks the reign
Of stocks, at least, were well revived again."

There is, in truth, a certain fitness in setting in the stocks for
drunkenness; a firm confining of the wandering uncertain legs; a fixing
in one spot for quiet growing sober, and meditating on the misery of
drunkenness, a fitness that with the extreme of