These were, however, much eclipsed by his selfish spirit and avaricious disposition.” To Mr. Damon’s cure belonged a local astronomer, unlettered and untaught, a dreamer, who loved the stars. He knew them all and called them by name, and, meeting with scant sympathy in his star-gazing, scorned not the humblest disciple. “I swear,” he had been known to exclaim, “half the stars might go out of the sky, and nobody here would know it, if it wasn’t for me and Aunt Achsah.” The pastorates of Mr. Dunster, Mr. Stone, and Mr. Simpkins in the North Parish of Harwich included its transfer to Brewster, and covered a span of one hundred and thirty-one years. Mr. Dunster married Reliance, daughter of Governor Hinckley, who is said to have been baptized on the day of the memorable “swamp fight” that ended King Philip’s War, and received her name in “token of firm reliance in Divine Power” held by her mother for the safety of the father who was fighting that day. Mr. Stone, in 1730, inveighs against “a sad failing in family government—a wicked practice of young people in their courtships which I have borne my public testimony against”—an allusion, no doubt, to the ancient betrothal custom of “sitting-up.” There are interesting cases of parish discipline recorded. In Mr. Dunster’s time, “the church met to hear a charge examined against a sister, brought by another sister in the church, the pushing her out of a pew, and hunching another in time of divine service in the meeting-house.” And as late as 1820 a committee was appointed “to keep the meeting-house clear of dogs, and to kill them if their owners will not keep them out”; boys, likewise, the committee were to “take care of and keep them still in time of meeting.” No light task, we may guess, where the boys were segregated in a balcony apart as if for the special incitement of mischief; nor were boys the only ones who were irked by those long services. It was the sexton’s duty to turn the glass at the beginning of the sermon, which must be ended with the sand, and Freeman remembers the “early preparation for a determined stampede from the meeting-house the moment that the benediction was pronounced. Coats were buttoned, canes and hats were taken in hand, pew-doors were unbuttoned, and diligent and full preparation was made for a general rush to ensue as soon as the closing Amen should begin to be articulated by the minister. And such a babel of tongues and noisy scattering of devout worshippers as followed was memorable.” Nor is it remarkable that men should have welcomed the Amen as a blessed release when pews must have been stools of penance for a full-bodied sailor, or for a child whose short legs must dangle unsupported, so narrow was the seat, so hard and straight did the back rise therefrom. Mr. Freeman recalls other points of the service, that of the choir “tuning their voices—often with the aid of the bass viol and sometimes violin, during the