holiday nor the
Sabbath. And indeed the passing day is neither, nor is it a common
week day, although partaking of all three. It is the Thursday
Lecture; an institution which New England has long ago
relinquished, and almost forgotten, yet which it would have been
better to retain, as bearing relations both to the spiritual and
ordinary life. The tokens of its observance, however, which here
meet our eyes are of a rather questionable cast. It is in one sense
a day of public shame; the day on which transgressors who have made
themselves liable to the minor severities of the Puritan law
receive their reward of ignominy. At this very moment the constable
has bound an idle fellow to the whipping-post and is giving him his
deserts with a cat-o-nine-tails. Ever since sunrise Daniel
Fairfield has been standing on the steps of the meeting-house, with
a halter about his neck, which he is condemned to wear visibly
throughout his lifetime; Dorothy Talby is chained to a post at the
corner of Prison Lane with the hot sun blazing on her matronly
face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against
her husband; while through the bars of that great wooden cage, in
the centre of the scene, we discern either a human being or a wild
beast, or both in one. Such are the profitable sights that serve
the good people to while away the earlier part of the day."

Not only were criminals punished at this weekly gathering, but seditious
books were burned just after the lecture, intentions of marriage were
published, notices were posted, and at one time elections were held, on
Lecture-day. The religious exercises of the day resembled those of the
Sabbath and were sometimes five hours in length.

In primitive amusements, the sports of the woods and waters, even a
Puritan could find occasional and proper diversion without entering into
frivolous and sinful amusement. The wolf, most hated and most
destructive of all the beasts of the woods, a "ravening runnagadore,"
was a proper prey. Wolves were caught in pits, in log pens, in traps;
they were also hooked on mackerel hooks bound in an ugly bunch and
dipped in tallow, to which they were toled by dead carcasses. The swamps
were "beat up" in a wolf-drive or wolf-rout, similar to the English
"drift of the forest." A ring of men surrounded a wooded tract and drew
inward toward the centre,