Views of the New England States and Character determined by one’s Church.—Partial Notions about Clocks, Nutmegs, Pumpkin Pies, etc.—Getting an Historical Coach to one’s self.—Why the Puritans did not hang up their Stockings on their first Christmas Eve.—Their nearest Neighbors.—Indian Points and other Points.—Governor Carver and Want of Meats.—Massasoit, and how he kept his Faith in-violate.—New Hampshire on the Rampage.—Why Boston was begun, and why it is not finished.—Roger Williams and his Providential Ways and Doings.—Connecticut founded, although its Charter not found.—The Wind against Cromwell.—Harvard College.—Vermont and her Ways and Means. “Tell me,” says a witty Frenchman, “what time in the morning a man rises, and I will tell you his notions of the character of the Germans.” Tell us the kind of church a man attends, and we will undertake to give you his opinion of the character of the Puritan Pilgrims, and the objects and value of the New England settlements. Not more various are men’s religions than their New England convictions; as checkered and contrary as the black and white squares on a Scotch shawl. Some people, of pious trainings but of an agricultural turn of mind, hold the idea that New England came, like the wonderful coach in the story of Cinderella, from a pumpkin; and hence travel naturally to the conclusion that the principal mission of her people is to keep up Thanksgiving day. Others run all their lives with the notion that the Yankee States were settled by a race of peripatetic traders,—a revival of the school of Aristotle,—let out in Greece, and taking a play-spell here. Their picture of New England would be a pedler, dipped like a tallow-candle in an economical, tight-fitting suit of tawny homespun, driving a wagon full of tin notions, clocks, and a variety of domestic nutmegs, artistically whittled out of bass-wood, singing Old Hundred, with a pitch-pipe close to his nose to keep it in tune. Others, on the contrary, regard it as a large, full-bearing orchard in autumn, laden with golden fruit, fall-pippins, pearmains, seek-no-furthers, russets, and spitzenbergs, supplying its owners, the neighborhood, and the distant market with their incomparable harvest. Fortunate for the historian, for debating-societies, and the magazines are these variegated opinions. They give a spiciness to New England, as if she were a tropical garden instead of a poor-man’s patch, fenced in with rocks and spiked down with long pegs to prevent the frost in the spring from heaving her up uncomfortably. They serve, like French cookery, to present the same dish simmering in various sauces under different aspects and names, and yet all from the same little market-basket.