She
hoped God would help her to carry it Better for time to come." And
doubtless she did carry it better; for at the end of two years, this
bold virgin's fine for unruly behavior being still unpaid, half of it
was remitted.

Of the etiquette, the pleasures, the exigencies of colonial "courtship
in high life," let one of the actors speak for himself through the pages
of his diary. Judge Sewall's first wife was Hannah Hull, the only
daughter of Captain Hull of Pine Tree Shilling fame. She received as her
dowry her weight in silver shillings. Of her wooing we know naught save
the charming imaginary story told us by Hawthorne. The Judge's only
record is this:

"Mrs. Hannah Hull saw me when I took my Degree and set her
affection on me though I knew nothing of it till after our
Marriage."

She lived with him forty-three years, bore him seven sons and seven
daughters, and died on the 19th day of October, 1717.

Of course, though the Judge was sixty-six years old, he would marry
again. Like a true Puritan he despised an unmarried life, and on the 6th
day of February he made this naive entry in his diary: "Wandering in my
mind whether to live a Married or a Single Life." Ere that date he had
begun to take notice. He had called more than once on Widow Ruggles, and
had had Widow Gill to dine with him; had looked critically at Widow
Emery, and noted that Widow Tilley was absent from meeting; and he had
gazed admiringly at Widow Winthrop in "her sley," and he had visited
and counseled and consoled her ere his wife had been two months dead,
and had given her a few suitable tokens of his awakening affection such
as "Smoking Flax Inflamed," "The Jewish Children of Berlin," and "My
Small Vial of Tears;" so he had "wandered" in the flesh as well as in
the mind.

Such an array of widows! Boston fairly blossomed with widows, the widows
of all the "true New England men" whose wills Sewall had drawn up, whose
dying bedsides he had blessed and harassed with his prayers, whose
bodies he had borne to the grave, whose funeral gloves and scarves and
rings he had received and apprized, and whose estates he had settled.
Over this sombre flower-bed of black garbed widows, these hardy
perennials, did this aged Puritan butterfly amorously hover, loth to
settle, tasting each solemn sweet, calculating the richness of the soil
in which each was planted, gauging the golden promise of fruit, and
perhaps longing for the whole garden of