.
Here they all had punch and an "hour or so of jollity."

If the women's lives were conspicuously short, it was not so with the
men. Ebenezer Cobb, who died in 1801 in the one hundred and eighth year
of his age, had lived in no less than three centuries, having seen six
years in the seventeenth, the whole of the eighteenth, and a year of the
nineteenth.

The minister's tax is separated from the other town taxes in 1812--thus
even in this little village is reflected the great movement of
separation of Church and State. In 1851 when we read of a Unitarian
church being built we realize that the Puritan regime is over in New
England.

Thus with the assistance of the Pelegs and Hezekiahs, the Zadocks,
Ichabods, and Zenases--names which for some absurd and irreverent reason
suggest a picture puzzle--we manage to piece together scraps of the
Kingston of long ago.

We must confess to some relief at the inevitable conclusion that such
study brings--namely, that the early settlers were not the unblemished
prigs and paragons tradition has so fondly branded them. They seem to
have been human enough--erring enough, if we take these records penned
by themselves. However, for any such iconoclastic observation it is
reassuring to have the judgment of so careful a historian as Charles
Francis Adams. He says:

"That the earlier generations of Massachusetts were either more
law-abiding or more self-restrained than the later is a proposition
which accords neither with tradition nor with the reason of things. The
habits of those days were simpler than those of the present: they were
also essentially grosser...."

He then gives a dozen pages or so of hitherto unpublished church
records, gathered from as many typical Massachusetts towns, which throw
an undeniable and unflattering light on the social habits of that early
period. As explicit and public confession before the church congregation
was enforced, these church records contain startlingly graphic
statements of drunkenness, blasphemy, stealing, and immorality in all
its various phases.

There are countless church records which duplicate this one of the
ordination of a Massachusetts pastor in 1729: "6 Barrels and a half of
Cyder, 28 gallons of wine, 2 gallons of Brandy, and 4 of rum, loaf
sugar, lime juice and pipes," all, presumably, consumed at the time and
on the spot of the ordination. Even the most pessimistic must admit that
long before our prohibition era we had travele