of Peewawkin at this period was a well-preserved
specimen of the old, quiet, cozy hamlets of New England. No huge
factory threw its evil shadow over it; no smoking demon of an engine
dragged its long train through the streets; no steamboat puffed at its
wharves, or ploughed up the river, like the enchanted ship of the
Ancient Mariner,--

"Against the wind, against the tide,
Steadied with upright keel."

The march of mind had not overtaken it. It had neither printing-press
nor lyceum. As the fathers had done before them, so did its inhabitants
at the time of my visit. There was little or no competition in their
business; there were no rich men, and none that seemed over-anxious to
become so. Two or three small vessels were annually launched from the
carpenters' yards on the river. It had a blacksmith's shop, with its
clang of iron and roar of bellows; a pottery, garnished with its coarse
earthen-ware; a store, where molasses, sugar, and spices were sold on
one side, and calicoes, tape, and ribbons on the other. Three or four
small schooners annually left the wharves for the St. George's and
Labrador fisheries. Just back of the village, a bright, noisy stream,
gushing out, like a merry laugh, from the walnut and oak woods which
stretched back far to the north through a narrow break in the hills,
turned the great wheel of a grist-mill, and went frolicking away, like a
wicked Undine, under the very windows of the brown, lilac-shaded house
of Deacon Warner, the miller, as if to tempt the good man's handsome
daughters to take lessons in dancing. At one end of the little
crescent-shaped village, at the corner of the main road and the green
lane to Deacon Warner's mill, stood the school-house,--a small, ill-
used, Spanish-brown building, its patched windows bearing unmistakable
evidence of the mischievous character of its inmates. At the other end,
farther up the river, on a rocky knoll open to all the winds, stood the
meeting-house,--old, two story, and full of windows,--its gilded
weathercock glistening in the sun. The bell in its belfry had been
brought from France by Skipper Evans in the latter part of the last
century. Solemnly baptized and consecrated to some holy saint, it had
called to prayer the veiled sisters of a convent, and tolled heavily in
the masses for the dead. At first some of the church felt misgivings as
to the propriety of hanging a Popish bell in a Puritan stee