und several
articles wet and liable to be spoiled, we had to stay and dry them.

[Footnote 416: The Thursday Lecture.]

_28th, Friday._ One of the best ministers in the place being very
sick, a day of fasting and prayer was observed in a church near by our
house. We went into the church, where, in the first place, a minister
made a prayer in the pulpit, of full two hours in length; after which
an old minister delivered a sermon an hour long, and after that a
prayer was made, and some verses sung out of the Psalms. In the
afternoon, three or four hours were consumed with nothing except
prayers, three ministers relieving each other alternately; when one
was tired, another went up into the pulpit.[417] There was no more
devotion than in other churches, and even less than at New York; no
respect, no reverence; in a word, nothing but the name of
Independents; and that was all.

[Footnote 417: This fast is not noted in the elaborate list in Mr.
Love's _Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England_. The Old South
Church had a fast on June 29, O.S., but this was June 28, N.S.]

_29th, Saturday._ To-day a captain arrived from New York, named Lucas,
who had sailed from there last Friday. He said no ships had arrived
there from Europe, and that matters remained as we left them. There
was a report that another governor was coming to New York, and it was
said he was a man who was much liked in Boston; that many complaints
had been made against the other one, such as oppressing the people,
imposing high duties when his instructions provided they should not be
more than two per cent., I believe, rendering a false account, in
which he had charged a dock as having been made at a cost of
twenty-eight pounds sterling which had not cost a cent, as the
citizens had constructed it themselves, etc.[418] This will perhaps
cause some change in these parts and relieve the people. Lucas brought
with him the sister and brother-in-law of Ephraim's wife, recently
married, but we had never spoken to them.[419]

[Footnote 418: There was an official inquiry into these charges. See
accusation and defense in _N.Y. Col. Doc._, III. 302, 308.]

[Footnote 419: The bridegroom was Captain Theunis de Key (b. 1659),
son of Jacob Theuniszen van Tuyl of New York. The bride was Helena van
Brugh, half-sister of Elizabeth Rodenburg, being the daughter of the
latter's mother Catharina Roelofs by her second husband, Johannes
Pieterszen van Brugh of Haarlem and lat