verse, and the
length of prayer was measured by the physical endurance of the
performer.

The preacher often boiled his sermon down to four hours, and the sexton
up-ended the hourglass each hour. Boys who went to sleep in church were
sand-bagged, and grew up to be border murderers.

New York people were essentially Dutch. New York gets her Santa Claus,
her doughnuts, crullers, cookies, and many of her odors, from the Dutch.
The New York matron ran to fine linen and a polished door-knocker, while
the New England housewife spun linsey-woolsey and knit "yarn mittens"
for those she loved.

Philadelphia was the largest city in the United States, and was noted
for its cleanliness and generally sterling qualities of mind and heart,
its Sabbath trance and clean white door-steps.

The Southern Colonies were quite different from those of the North. In
place of thickly-settled towns there were large plantations with African
villages near the house of the owner. The proprietor was a sort of
country squire, living in considerable comfort for those days. He fed
and clothed everybody, black or white, who lived on the estate, and
waited patiently for the colored people to do his work and keep well, so
that they would be more valuable. The colored people were blessed with
children at a great rate, so that at this writing, though voteless, they
send a large number of members to Congress. This cheers the Southern
heart and partially recoups him for his chickens. (See Appendix.)

The South then, as now, cured immense quantities of tobacco, while the
North tried to cure those who used it.

Washington was a Virginian. He packed his own flour with his own hands,
and it was never inspected. People who knew him said that the only man
who ever tried to inspect Washington's flour was buried under a hill of
choice watermelons at Mount Vernon.

Along the James and Rappahannock the vast estates often passed from
father to son according to the law of entail, and such a thing as a poor
man "prior to the war" must have been unknown.

[Illustration: NOT RICH BEFORE THE WAR.]

Education, however, flourished more at the North, owing partly to the
fact that the people lived more in communities. Governor Berkeley of
Virginia was opposed to free schools from the start, and said, "I thank
God there are no free schools nor printing-presses here, and I hope we
shall not have them these hundred years." His prayer has been answered.

CHAPTER XIV