joyed their frolicking ride and the fine Providence dinners and wine.
All returned in high spirits with Shaffer to Boston on Saturday to meet
the sad, sad news that the rival coach lines had made a compromise and
had both signed a contract to carry passengers thereafter for two
dollars a trip.

Upon Tremont Street, near Winter Street, in Boston, there stood at that
time in a garden a fine old house which was kept as a restaurant, and
was a pleasant summer lounging-place for all gay cits. One day a very
portly, aldermanic man presented himself at the entrance of the
restaurant and asked the price of a dinner. Shaffer, who was present,
immediately assumed all the obsequious airs of a waiter, and calling for
a tape-measure, proceeded to measure the distance around the protuberant
waist of the astonished and insulted inquirer, who could hardly believe
his sense of hearing when the impudent Shaffer very politely answered,
"Price of dinner, sir!--about four dollars, sir!--for that size, sir!"
Such were the practical jokes of stage and tavern life in olden days.

IX

HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS

The first century of colonial life saw few set times and days for
pleasures. The holy days of the English Church were as a stench to the
Puritan nostrils, and their public celebration was at once rigidly
forbidden by the laws of New England. New holidays were not quickly
evolved, and the sober gatherings for matters of Church and State for a
time took their place. The hatred of "wanton Bacchanallian Christmasses"
spent throughout England, as Cotton said, in "revelling, dicing,
carding, masking, mumming, consumed in compotations, in interludes, in
excess of wine, in mad mirth," was the natural reaction of intelligent
and thoughtful minds against the excesses of a festival which had ceased
to be a Christian holiday, but was dominated by a lord of misrule who
did not hesitate to invade the churches in time of service, in his noisy
revels and sports. English Churchmen long ago revolted also against such
Christmas observance.

Of the first Pilgrim Christmas we know but little, save that it was
spent, as was many a later one, in work. Bradford said: "Ye 25 day
begane to erect y^e first house for comone use to receive them and
their goods." On the following Christmas the governor records with grim
humor a "passage rather of mirth than of waight." Some new company
excused themselves from work on that day, saying it went against their