appealed to
Samuel Butler as worthy of further elaboration. Morton's "New English
Canaan" appeared in 1632. About thirty years later the second part of
the famous English satire "Hudibras" appeared, embodying Morton's idea
in altered but recognizable form, in what was the most popular English
book of the day. This satire, appearing when the reaction against
Puritanism was at its height, was accepted and solemnly deposited at the
door of the good people of Boston and Plymouth! And thus it was that
Morton's fabricated tale of the Weymouth hanging passed into genuine
history along with the "blue laws" of Connecticut. One cannot help
believing that the mischievous perpetrator of the fable laughed up his
sleeve at its result, and one cannot resist the thought that he was
probably delighted to have the scandal attached to those righteous
neighbors of his who had run him out of his dear Ma-re-mount.

However, driven out he was: the Maypole about which the revelers had
danced was hewed down by the stern zealots who believed in dancing about
only one pole, and that the whipping-post. Merrymount was deserted.

Certainly Weymouth, the honey spot which attracted not industrious bees,
but only drones, was having a hard time getting settled! It was not
until the Reverend Joseph Hull received permission from the General
Court to settle here with twenty-one families, from Weymouth, England,
that the town was at last shepherded into the Puritan fold.

These settlers, of good English stock and with the earnest ideals of
pioneers, soon brought the community into good repute, and its
subsequent life was as respectable and uneventful as that of a reformed
_roue_. In fact there is practically no more history for Weymouth. There
are certainly no more raids upon merry-makers; no more calls from the
cricket colony which had sung all summer on the banks of the river to
the ant colony which had providently toiled on the shore of the bay; no
more experimental governments; no more scandal. The men and women of the
next five generations were a poor, hard-working race, rising early and
toiling late. The men worked in the fields, tending the flocks, planting
and gathering the harvest. The women worked in the houses, in the
dairies and kitchens, at the spinning-wheel and washtub. The privations
and loneliness, which are part of every struggling colony, were
augmented here, where the houses did not cluster about the church and
burial ground, but were