Bachelors were under the special spying and tattling supervision of the constable, the watchman, and the tithingman, who, like Pliable in Pilgrim's Progress, sat sneaking among his neighbors and reported their "scirscumstances and conuersation." In those days a man gained instead of losing his freedom by marrying. "Incurridgement" to wedlock was given bachelors in many towns by the assignment to them upon marriage of home-lots to build upon. In Medfield there was a so-called Bachelor's Row, which had been thus assigned. In the early days of Salem "maid lotts" were also granted; but Endicott wrote in the town records that it was best to abandon the custom and thus "avoid all presedents & evil events of granting lotts vnto single maidens not disposed of." This line he crossed out and wrote instead, "for avoiding of absurdities." He kindly, but rather disappointingly, gave one maid a bushel of corn when she came to ask for a house and lot, and told her it would be a "bad president" for her to keep house alone. A maid had, indeed, a hard time to live in colonial days, did she persevere in her singular choice of remaining single. Perhaps the colonists "proverb'd with the grandsire phrase," that women dying maids lead apes in hell. Maidens "withering on the virgin thorn," in single blessedness, were hard to find. One Mistress Poole lived unmarried to great old age, and helped to found the town of Taunton under most discouraging rebuffs; and in the Plymouth church record of March 19, 1667, is a record of a death which reads thus:-- "Mary Carpenter sister of Mrs. Alice Bradford wife of Governor Bradford being newly entered into the 91st year of her age. She was a godly old maid never married." The state of old maidism was reached at a very early age in those early days; Higginson wrote of an "antient maid" of twenty-five years. John Dunton in his "Life and Errors" wrote eulogistically of one such ideal "Virgin" who attracted his special attention. "It is true an _old_ (or superanuated) Maid in Boston is thought such a curse, as nothing can exceed it (and looked on as a _dismal_ spectacle) yet she by her good nature, gravity, and strict virtue convinces all (so much as the fleering Beaus) that it is not her necessity but her choice that keeps her a Virgin. She is now about thirty years (the age which they call a _Thornback_) yet she never disguises herself, and talks as little as she thinks, of Love. She never reads any Plays or Romances, goes to no Balls or Dancing-match (as they do who go to such Fairs) to meet with Chapmen. Her looks, her speech, her whole behavior are so very chaste, that but once (at Govenor's Island, where we went to be merry at roasting a hog) going to kiss her, I thought she would have blushed to death.