ed their admiration and esteem.
So, too, their own executions of Divine laws were successful as they
gave pain, and the most beautiful features of Christianity,--namely,
love and charity,--according to history, were not cultivated very much.

There were in New England at one time twelve offences punishable with
death, and in Virginia seventeen. This would indicate that the
death-penalty is getting unpopular very fast, and that in the contiguous
future humane people will wonder why murder should have called for
murder, in this brainy, charitable, and occult age, in which man seems
almost able to pry open the future and catch a glimpse of Destiny
underneath the great tent that has heretofore held him off by means of
death's prohibitory rates.

[Illustration: THE TOWN WATCHMAN.]

In Hartford people had to get up when the town watchman rang his bell.
The affairs of the family, and private matters too numerous to mention,
were regulated by the selectmen. The catalogues of Harvard and Yale were
regulated according to the standing of the family as per record in the
old country, and not as per bust measurement and merit, as it is to-day.

Scolding women, however, were gagged and tied to their front doors, so
that the populace could bite its thumb at them, and hired girls received
fifty dollars a year, with the understanding that they were not to have
over two days out each week, except Sunday and the days they had to go
and see their "sick sisters."

Some cloth-weaving was indulged in, and homespun was the principal
material used for clothing. Mrs. Washington had sixteen spinning-wheels
in her house. Her husband often wore homespun while at home, and on
rainy days sometimes placed a pair of home-made trousers of the
barn-door variety in the Presidential chair.

Money was very scarce, and ammunition very valuable. In 1635
musket-balls passed for farthings, and to see a New England peasant
making change with the red brother at thirty yards was a common and
delightful scene.

The first press was set up in Cambridge in 1639, with the statement that
it "had come to stay." Books printed in those days were mostly sermons
filled with the most comfortable assurance that the man who let loose
his intellect and allowed it to disbelieve some very difficult things
would be essentially----well, I hate to say right here in a book what
would happen to him.

[Illustration: BOOKS FILLED WITH ASSURANCES OF FUTURE DAMNATION.]

The first