apple-paring bees, into which the neighborhoods entered with great zest. In the towns there was more pretension and ceremonial; but taking changed conditions into account, the life of the townspeople and their habits of thought differed but little from those of their rural cousins. Sidenote: Roads and travel. The highways were generally of fair character, but the larger streams were unbridged. Outside of the neighborhoods of the large towns wheeled vehicles, except for heavy loads, were not common until the time of the Revolution. Horseback was the ordinary mode of travel. A tavern kept by some leading citizen could be found in every town, with good lodgings at reasonable rates, although there was general complaint of the cookery. Nowhere else in the colonies was there so much intercommunication as in New England. 79. Moral and Religious Conditions. Sidenote: Education. A system of public education was among the first institutions established by the Puritans. Each town had its school; by 1649 there was no New England colony, except Rhode Island, in which some degree of education was not compulsory. Deep learning was rare, but the people were well drilled in the rudiments; except on the far-off borders of Maine there was no illiteracy in New England when the Revolution broke out. Latin schools and academies soon supplemented parental instruction and the common schools. We have seen that Boston was but six years old when Harvard College was established (1636); and Yale College was opened at New Haven in the year 1700. Sidenote: Crime. Crime appears to have been less frequent in New England than in the Southern or the middle colonies; the highways were safe after the close of King Philip's war and the Tarratine trouble; doors and windows were seldom barred in the country, and young women could travel anywhere with perfect safety. The list of capital crimes was a long one in that day, as well in the mother-land as in the colonies, and hangings, particularly of the pirates who infested the coast, were spectacles frequently seen in New England. A more cruel form of punishment was reserved for the negro race. There were several cases of negroes being burned at the stake for murder or arson. Great publicity was given to all manner of punishments; gibbets, stocks, ducking-stools, pillories, and whipping-posts were familiar objects in nearly every town. Criminals might also be branded, mutilated, or compelled to wear, conspicuously sewed to their garments, colored letters indicative of the offences committed. Hawthorne's romance of the "Scarlet Letter" is based on this last-named custom. Sidenote: Religion.