eak New England
he had a Spartan struggle for life. In summer-time he fared
comparatively well, but in winter the ill-heated houses of the colonists
gave to him a most chilling and benumbing welcome. Within the great open
fireplace, when fairly scorched in the face by the glowing flames of the
roaring wood fire, he might be bathed and dressed, and he might be
cuddled and nursed in warmth and comfort; but all his baby hours could
not be spent in the ingleside, and were he carried four feet away from
the chimney on a raw winter's day he found in his new home a temperature
that would make a modern infant scream with indignant discomfort, or lie
stupefied with cold.

Nor was he permitted even in the first dismal days of his life to stay
peacefully within-doors. On the Sunday following his birth he was
carried to the meeting-house to be baptized. When we consider the chill
and gloom of those unheated, freezing churches, growing colder and
damper and deadlier with every wintry blast--we wonder that grown
persons even could bear the exposure. Still more do we marvel that
tender babes ever lived through their cruel winter christenings when it
is recorded that the ice had to be broken in the christening bowl. In
villages and towns where the houses were all clustered around the
meeting-house the baby Puritans did not have to be carried far to be
baptized; but in country parishes, where the dwelling-houses were widely
scattered, it might be truthfully recorded of many a chrisom-child:
"Died of being baptized." One cruel parson believed in and practised
infant immersion, fairly a Puritan torture, until his own child nearly
lost its life thereby.

Dressed in fine linen and wrapped in a hand-woven christening blanket--a
"bearing-cloth"--the unfortunate young Puritan was carried to church in
the arms of the midwife, who was a person of vast importance and dignity
as well as of service in early colonial days, when families of from
fifteen to twenty children were quite the common quota. At the altar the
baby was placed in his proud father's arms, and received his first cold
and disheartening reception into the Puritan Church. In the pages of
Judge Samuel Sewall's diary, to which alone we can turn for any definite
or extended contemporary picture of colonial life in Puritan New
England, as for knowledge of England of that date we turn to the diaries
of Evelyn and Pepys, we find abundant proof that inclemency of weather
was little heede