The soft, April-like rains of clemency, now and then, however, began to fall upon these hard enactments. Quakers mildly doubted whether these scarecrows really frightened other offenders off the fields of crime. Silent tears, shed in secret household places over brothers and sons hung up on high hills for stealing or trespass, began to gather, like the waters of fountains hidden away in the depths of valleys, and to create that large American river, Public Sentiment,—larger than the Hudson, the Ohio, or the Mississippi,—which, rising and rising, has swept so many abuses and errors into the gulfs of time. That solemn Saxon joke, a coroner’s inquest, as gloomy in its dissections, and as funny in its illogical conclusions, as in the land of the heptarchy, was not denied to those deodand colonists whose hearts suddenly stopped beating, and whose mortal wrecks, thrown up on that very weary shore “Crow’ners Law” were always prizes for small bunglers. For live men, _habeas corpus_, that great opener of illegally locked doors, began at the close of the century to be provided. If colonial judges sometimes wrote to England to know how to decide cases politically edged, for fear they might cut a royal prerogative or sharpen popular rights; or if justices of the peace—those small pedlers of very common law, and uncommon specimens of judicial wares—dribbled out decisions for plaintiff or defendant, not knowing which was which, the puzzled magistrate giving opinions about the off ox, without knowing which was the “off” or which the “near” ox; or if sometimes in extreme cases the obfuscated and doubting arbiter of law consulted his wife and retailed her caudle lecture to the astonished suitor, as his well-considered judgment in the case,—in the main it may be averred that justice was as well tolled from the mills, as in these latter days when the judicial miller takes from the bag before the grist goes in, and sees to it that his private gutter taps the hopper before it shakes itself into the customer’s heap. Color is supposed to lurk just under the outer skin, and, if placed on the scales, to be imponderable; but it was always found that positive colors, when put on the judicial Fair banks, were very light; the white, which is no color at all, invariably weighing down that side of the balance, when a cinnamon-colored Indian or a black-berried African was found in the other. The black man always lost at the checker-board, even when the moves were claimed to be on the square. In fact, until a few years past, when the military game called “drafts” began, luck never favored that color at the little game of law, at which two can play and one pay, or in fact at any of the larger games of life in America. The bleaching-powders that whiten even the ermine were slow in coming into use. The seventeenth century, like so many of its ancestors, while working its double team, one white and the other