The homely virtue of being a good cheese-maker was truly a saving clause to palliate and excuse so much feminine scientific knowledge. CHAPTER III. “DOUBLE-TONGUED AND NAUGHTY WOMEN.” I am much impressed in reading the court records of those early days, to note the vast care taken in all the colonies to prevent lying, slandering, gossiping, backbiting, and idle babbling, or, as they termed it, “brabling;” to punish “common sowers and movers”--of dissensions, I suppose. The loving neighborliness which proved as strong and as indispensable a foundation for a successful colony as did godliness, made the settlers resent deeply any violations, though petty, of the laws of social kindness. They felt that what they termed “opprobrious schandalls tending to defamaçon and disparagment” could not be endured. One old author declares that “blabbing, babbling, tale-telling, and discovering the faults and frailities of others is a most Common and evill practice.” He asserts that a woman should be a “main store house of secresie, a Maggazine of taciturnitie, the closet of connivence, the mumbudget of silence, the cloake bagge of rouncell, the capcase, fardel, or pack of friendly toleration;” which, as a whole, seems to be a good deal to ask. Men were, as appears by the records, more frequently brought up for these offences of the tongue, but women were not spared either in indictment or punishment. In Windsor, Conn., one woman was whipped for “wounding” a neighbor, not in the flesh, but in the sensibilities. In 1652 Joane Barnes, of Plymouth, Mass., was indicted for “slandering,” and sentenced “to sitt in the stockes during the Courts pleasure, and a paper whereon her facte written in Capitall letters to be made faste vnto her hatt or neare vnto her all the tyme of her sitting there.” In 1654 another Joane in Northampton County, Va., suffered a peculiarly degrading punishment for slander. She was “drawen ouer the Kings Creeke at the starne of a boate or Canoux, also the next Saboth day in the tyme of diuine seruis” was obliged to present herself before the minister and congregation, and acknowledge her fault, and ask forgiveness. This was an old Scotch custom. The same year one Charlton called the parson, Mr. Cotton, a “black cotted rascal,” and was punished therefor in the same way. Richard Buckland, for writing a slanderous song about Ann Smith, was similarly pilloried, bearing a paper on his hat inscribed _Inimicus Libellus_, and since possibly all the church attendants did not know Latin, to publicly beg Ann’s forgiveness in English for his libellous poesy. The punishment of offenders by exposing them, wrapped in sheets, or attired in foul clothing, on the stool of repentance in the meeting-house in time of divine service, has always seemed to me specially bitter, unseemly, and unbearable.