His successor was Rev. Jeremiah Hobart, a Harvard graduate, who preached for a while at Beverly and found difficulty in collecting his salary. He remained at Topsfield eight years and during that time became a familiar figure at the County Courts, because of non-payment of salary, for cursing and swearing, and for a damaging suit for slander exhibiting much testimony discreditable to him. Even his brother ministers and the churches were not free from his reproachful and scandalous speeches so he at last was dismissed and two years later was followed by a godly man, Rev. Joseph Capen of Dorchester, who enjoyed a peaceful pastorate of nearly forty years. The severe penalties of the English legal code were much modified in the Bay Colony but public executions continued until the middle of the nineteenth century and were usually more or less a public holiday. The condemned was taken in a cart through the streets to the gallows. Not infrequently a sermon was preached by some minister on the Sunday previous to the execution and speeches from the gallows always thrilled the crowd. The execution of pirates drew many people from some distance. Several Rhode Island murderers were executed and afterwards hung in chains. The gibbeting of the bodies of executed persons does not seem to have been general.[91] [91] Robert Hunt, a lime seller of Boston, differing with a man, drew a sword and made two or three passes at him, upon which the man seized the sword and broke it and went for a warrant to apprehend Hunt who at once shut himself up in his house with a loaded gun and two pistols beside him. When the officers appeared he fired out of the window several times and wounded two boys but at last was taken and committed to prison where three days later he committed suicide by hanging "with an old single Garter." The same afternoon his body "was carried thro' the Town in a Cart, and buried near the Gallows, having a stake first drove thro' it."--_Boston Gazette_, Apr. 18, 1749.