We have also at this time the report which the scurrilous Ned Ward made of the puritan town and its people;[183] but it is not well to believe all of his talk about the innocence of doves and the subtile wiles of serpents, though life in Boston was not without its contrasts, as we look back upon it now. Samuel Sewall, her first abolitionist, was even then pointing the finger of doom to the insidious evil in his _Selling of Joseph_. Not altogether foreign to the thoughts of many were the political possibilities of the coming century, when on New Year’s Day, 1701, the bellman’s clangor was heard, as he toned Sewall’s memorial verses through the streets. There was a certain fitness in the century being ushered in, for New England at least, by the man who was to make posterity best acquainted with its life, and who as a circuit judge, coursing statedly the country ways, saw more to portray than any one else. Sewall was an honest man, if in many respects a petty one. He had figured in one of the noblest spectacles ever seen in the self-willed puritan capital, when on a fast day, January 14, 1697, he had stood up in the meeting-house, and had listened with bowed head to the reading of his penitential confession for the sin of his complicity in the witchcraft trials. Stoughton, the lieutenant-governor, and chief justice of those trials, was quite another type of the puritan fatalist, from whom it was futile to expect a like contrition; and when, at a later day (December 25, 1698), Stoughton invited to dinner the council and omitted Sewall, who was one of them, one might fancy the cause was in no pleasant associations with the remembrance of that scene in Parson Willard’s meeting-house. It is characteristic of Sewall that this social slight oppressed him for fear that Bellomont, who had not yet come, might hear of it, and count him less! But poor Sewall was a man whom many things disturbed, whether it was that to mock him some one scattered a pack of playing-cards in his fore-yard, or that some of the godly chose to wear a wig![184] [Illustration: SAMUEL SEWALL. This follows the steel engraving in _Sewall Papers_, vol. i. There is another likeness in _N. E. H. & Gen. Reg._, i. 105. Cf. also Higginson’s _Larger Hist. United States_, p. 208.] The smiting of the Mathers, to which reference has been made, was a business of serious moment to those theocrats. Whoever was not in sympathy with their protests fared badly in their mouths. “Mr. Cotton Mather,” records Sewall (October 20, 1701), “came to Mr. Wilke’s shop, and there talked very sharply against me, as if I had used his father worse than a neger; spoke so loud that people in the street might hear him.” There is about as near an approach to conscious pleasantry as we ever find in Sewall when, writing, some days later, that he had sent Mr. Increase Mather a haunch of very good venison, he adds, “I hope in that I did not treat him as a negro.”