ritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild
as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the
scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They
were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an
immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the
waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even
in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They
transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were
binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and
quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from
pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around
them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,
rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,
not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds
on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be
arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for
instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens
of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled
all their necks in a modern court of justice.

But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with
hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the
wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a
man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his
reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was
disreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan
elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned
hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of
these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor
animadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,
the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and
familiar talk wi