about them; and moreover, that such whimsies had made a great deal of trouble even among the wiser heads on the old island, and, if indulged in, would be sure to bring their progeny into bad habits and to worse ends. These injunctions and warnings of course only increased curiosity, led to talks across the dinner-table and in the evenings after the day’s work was over. The more they talked it over, the more, of course, they set their hearts upon having the forbidden fruit. It was found that Virginia had enjoyed the dangerous luxuries of sending two men from every one of her eleven boroughs to do both these improper things, ever since she was twelve years old. She, too, had been permitted to have a jury-box, and liked the music of it right well, although some of the twelve strings sometimes got out of order, and the instrument occasionally played too long when badly wound up. Favoritism in a family is never pleasant for the unfavored ones. The others could not see why they should not have what Virginia was allowed. The subject became at last a sore one, and several times ended in angry flushes and muttered adjectives that went off without any nouns to touch them; some into the air, and some—we are forced to say—right into the faces of the old people. Cromwell, that brusk English step-father, who, after the sudden taking off of his predecessor, Charles I., vigorously seized the cold hand of Albion, had his favorites among the step-children, the New-Englanders. Yet he did not hesitate to trounce them as soundly as he did Virginia and the two Carolinas, whenever they set up their wills against his. It was he who, in 1651, tied up all the colonies by those leading-strings, the Navigation Acts. When Charles II. came into the family, these colonial cords were not cut, but multiplied and tied into knots, not at all sailor fashion. In fact, whoever ruled the house, Commonwealth, Stuart, or Orange, strengthened and doubled these vexatious marine strings, until finally father and children were threatened with the fate of Laocoön. [Illustration: TEMPTATION; OR, THE FIRST AMERICAN “RING.” (p. 153) ] The large swimming-bath of the Atlantic, so near their doors, sorely tempted the young swimmers; but the old people insisted upon nothing so much as the maxim, not to go into the waters of commerce until they had learned to swim, and never to begin to learn an art so perilous to—themselves. In fact, the entire maritime policy of England towards the colonies was very dry nursing on very wet principles.