Church, and to moralize in ambitious theological comments thereon, was checked by the sensible aunt with whom she lived, who said, "A Miss of 12 years cant possibly do justice to nice Subjects in Divinity, and therefore had better not attempt a repetition of particulars." We, therefore, have a story of her life, not of her thoughts; and many references to her diary appear in this volume. [Illustration: Anna Green Winslow] It is curious and interesting to note how Puritan traits and habits lingered in generation after generation, and outlived change of environment and mode of living. In 1630, Rev. John White of Dorchester, England, brought out a Puritan colony which settled in Massachusetts, and named the village Dorchester, after their English home. In 1695, a group of the descendants of these settlers once more emigrated to "Carolina." Tradition asserts that they were horrified at the persecution of witches in Massachusetts. Upham names one Daniel Andrew as a man who protested so vigorously against the prevailing folly and persecution, that he was compelled to fly to South Carolina. Thomas Staples was fearless enough to sue and obtain judgment against the Deputy Governor for saying Goodwife Staples was a witch, and members of his family went also to South Carolina. With loyalty to their two Dorchester homes, a third Dorchester, in South Carolina, was named. They built a good church which is still standing, though the village has entirely disappeared, and the site is overgrown with large trees. Indian wars, poor government, church oppression, and malaria once more drove forth these undaunted Puritans to found a fourth Dorchester in Georgia. In 1752, they left in a body, took up a grant of twenty-two thousand acres in St. John's Parish, and formed the Midway Church. Their meeting-house was headquarters for the Whigs during the Revolution, was burned by the British, rebuilt in 1790, and is still standing. In it meetings are held every spring by hundreds of the descendants of its early members, though it is remote from railroads, and swamps and pine barrens have taken the place of smiling rice and cotton fields. Stories of the rigidity of church government of these people still exist. The tradition of one child who smiled in Midway Church was for generations held up with horror, "as though she had hoofs and horns." There attended this church a descendant of both Andrew and Staples, the scoffers at witches, one Mary Osgood Sumner. She had a short and sad life. Married at eighteen she was a widow at twenty, and with her sister, Mrs. Holmes (an aunt of Oliver Wendell Holmes), and another sister, Anne, sailed from Newport to New York, "and were never heard of more." [Illustration: Pages from the Diary of Mary Osgood Sumner]