The accommodations turned out to be anything but good; and she left her host with a sigh of relief, and the thought "He differed only in this from the old fellow in t' other country--he let us depart," following the observation with a rimed warning for subsequent travelers to avoid this earthly hell. These are quoted not because they are admirable or worthy of imitation but because they give an indication of what was going on under one very respectable bonnet when Mrs. Knight was sitting decorously in her Boston pew. She was a highly respected woman in the Puritan community. She was accustomed to its ways. There is no word of motherly regret that she was away from her little daughter on Christmas Day, for Christmas was not a festal day in her calendar. Of the people who were coming into manhood and womanhood when Sarah Kemble Knight was born, Hawthorne wrote in "The Scarlet Letter": "The generation next to the early immigrants wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety." It was men like the author of the "Magnalia" who had darkened the national visage, but women here and there, like the writer of this Journal, who had already returning gleams of gayety. Of the three people whom we have taken as types of New-England thought at this period, Cotton Mather may fairly be regarded as representing the faith of a declining theology, Samuel Sewall the hope of a broader and more generous civic attitude, and Mrs. Knight as the flicker of charity or warm-hearted and genial fellow-feeling which had been almost extinguished in the seventeenth century. BOOK LIST =_General References_= CHAMBERLAIN, N. H. Samuel Sewall and the World he Lived in. 1897. COBB, S. H. Rise of Religious Liberty in America. 1902. DEXTER, HENRY M. The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years as Seen in its Literature. With a bibliographical appendix. 1880. (An excellent history, and indispensable for its bibliographical information.) EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Child Life in Colonial Days. 1904. EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Curious Punishments of Bygone Days. 1896 and 1907. EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Customs and Fashions in Old New England. 1893. EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Home Life in Colonial Days. 1898. EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Stage-Coach and Tavern Days. 1900. FISKE, JOHN. New France and New England, chap. v. MASSON, DAVID. Life of John Milton. 1859-1880. 6 vols. (Valuable for the English backgrounds of Puritanism.) RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature, chap. iv. TYLER, M. C. A History of American Literature. Colonial Period. Vol. I, chaps. xii, xiii. WALKER, W. Ten New England Leaders. 1901. WENDELL, BARRETT. Literary History of America, Bk. I, chap. V. 1901. =_Individual Authors_=