Before Allen took Ticonderoga, Vermont had eleven Congregational and four Baptist churches. For a quarter of a century (1783-1807) towns and parishes could assess taxes for churches and ministers. At the very threshold of Vermont's existence the laws had a Puritanic severity. "High-handed blasphemy" was punished with death; while fines or the stocks were the rewards of profane swearing, drunkenness, unseasonable night-walking, disturbing Sabbath worship, travelling Sunday, gaming, horse-racing, confirmed tavern-haunting, mischievous lying, and even meeting in company Saturday or Sunday evenings except in religious meetings. "No person shall drive a team or droves of any kind, or travel on the Lord's day (except it be on business that concerns the present war, or by some adversity they are belated and forced to lodge in the woods, wilderness, or highways the night before)," then only to next shelter. The wife of the Rev. Sam. Williams was arrested in New Hampshire for travelling on Sunday. No Jew, Roman Catholic, atheist, or deist could take the oath required of a member of the legislature; for that oath professed belief in the Deity, the divine inspiration of both Testaments, and the Protestant religion. The Rev. Samuel Peters, LL.D., sometimes called Bishop Peters, tells us the Munchausen story that he baptized into the Church of England 1,200 adults and children amid the forests of Vermont. In 1790 Vermont was enough of a diocese to hold a convention of eight parishes and two rectors. Bennington was the early nucleus of Vermont colonization. Samuel Robinson, of that town, had land to sell both in Bennington and the adjoining town of Shaftsbury. It is said he entertained over night the new immigrants; if Baptists, he sold them land in Shaftsbury; if Congregationalists, he sold them land in Bennington. What visible tokens have we of Vermont's pride in this hero, to whom she is so much indebted for her existence as a state? The earliest statue of Ethan Allen was by Benjamin Harris Kinney, a native of Sunderland. It was modelled in Burlington and exhibited there in 1852. The Rev. Zadoc Thompson said of it: "All who have long and carefully examined his statue will admit that the artist, Mr. Kinney, our respected townsman, has embodied and presented to the eye the ideal in a most masterly manner." The Hon. David Read says: "The statue was examined by several aged people who had personally known Allen, and all pronounce it an excellent likeness of him." Henry de Puy has an engraving of this statue in his book about Allen in 1853. This statue has never been purchased from Mr. Kinney, and it is still in his possession. The two statues of Allen made for the state are the work of Larkin G. Mead, a native of Chesterfield, N. H., reared and educated in Brattleboro. One of them, at the entrance of the state-house in Montpelier, is of Rutland marble. The other one, in the Capitol at Washington, is of Italian marble.