t many were wholly illiterate,
and it was not till long after Queen Anne's War that the remoter
settlements established schools, taught by poor students from Harvard or
less competent instructors, and held at first in private houses or under
sheds. The church at Wells had been burned by the Indians; and though
the settlers were beggared by the war, they voted in town-meeting to
build another. The new temple, begun in 1699, was a plain wooden
structure thirty feet square. For want of money the windows long
remained unglazed, the walls without plaster, and the floor without
seats; yet services were duly held here under direction of the minister,
Samuel Emery, to whom they paid L45 a year, half in provincial currency,
and half in farm-produce and fire-wood.

In spite of these efforts to maintain public worship, they were far from
being a religious community; nor were they a peaceful one. Gossip and
scandal ran riot; social jealousies abounded; and under what seemed
entire democratic equality, the lazy, drunken, and shiftless envied the
industrious and thrifty. Wells was infested, moreover, by several
"frightfully turbulent women," as the chronicle styles them, from whose
rabid tongues the minister himself did not always escape; and once, in
its earlier days, the town had been indicted for not providing a
ducking-stool to correct these breeders of discord.

Judicial officers were sometimes informally chosen by popular vote, and
sometimes appointed by the governor of Massachusetts from among the
inhabitants. As they knew no law, they gave judgment according to their
own ideas of justice, and their sentences were oftener wanting in wisdom
than in severity. Until after 1700 the county courts met by beat of drum
at some of the primitive inns or taverns with which the frontier
abounded.

At Wells and other outlying and endangered hamlets life was still
exceedingly rude. The log-cabins of the least thrifty were no better
furnished than Indian wigwams. The house of Edmond Littlefield, reputed
the richest man in Wells, consisted of two bedrooms and a kitchen, which
last served a great variety of uses, and was supplied with a table, a
pewter pot, a frying-pan, and a skillet; but no chairs, cups, saucers,
knives, forks, or spoons. In each of the two bedrooms there was a bed, a
blanket, and a chest. Another village notable--Ensign John Barrett--was
better provided, being the possessor of two beds, two chests and a box,
four pewter