Sermons were often two hours long; public prayer half an hour. Worse still was what went by the name of music--doggerel hymns full of the most sulphurous theology, uttered congregationally as "lined off" by the leader--nasal, dissonant, and discordant in the highest imaginable degree. The church itself was but a barn, homely-shaped, bare, and in winter cold as out-of-doors. At this season men wrapped their feet in bags, and women stuffed their muffs with hot stones. Sleepers were rudely awakened by the tithing-man's baton thwacking their heads; or, if females, by its fox-tail end brushing their cheeks. Fast-days were common. Prayer opened every public meeting, secular as well as religious. The doctrine of special providences was pressed to a ridiculous extreme. The devil was believed in no less firmly than God, and indefinitely great power ascribed to him. The Catechism--book second in authority only to the Bible--contained of his Satanic Majesty a cut, which children were left, not to say taught, to suppose as correct a likeness as that of Cromwell, which crowned the mantels of so many homes. [Illustration: Increase Mather.] In a people thus trained the miracle is not that witchcraft and superstition did so much mischief, but so little. Had it not been for their sturdy Saxon good sense its results must have proved infinitely more sad. The first remarkable case of sorcery in New England occurred at Boston, in 1688. Four children of a pious family were affected in a peculiar manner, imitating the cries of cats and dogs, and complaining of pains all over their bodies. These were the regulation symptoms of witch-possession, which presumably they had often heard discussed. An old Irish serving-woman, indentured to the family, who already bore the name of a witch, was charged with having bewitched them, and executed, the four ministers of Boston having first held at the house a day of prayer and fasting. [Illustration: Cotton Mather.]