the comfortable maintenance of a family." Sometimes allotments were equal; often they varied greatly in size, from an acre to fifty acres and even more; but always they were determined by a desire to be fair and just. The land was granted in full right and could be sold or bequeathed, though at first only with the consent of the community. With the grant generally went rights in woodland and pasture; and even meadow land, after the hay was got in, was open to the use of the villagers. The early New England town took into consideration the welfare and contentment of the individual, but it rated as of even greater importance the interests of the whole body. The settlements of New England inevitably presented great variations of local life and color, stretching as they did from the Plymouth trucking posts in Maine, through the fishing villages of Saco and York, and those on the Piscataqua, to the towns of Long Island and the frontier communities of western Connecticut--Stamford and Greenwich. The inhabitants to the number of more than thirty thousand in 1640 were not only in possession of the coast but were also pushing their way into the interior. To fishing and agriculture they added trading, lumbering, and commerce, and were constantly reaching out for new lands and wider opportunities. The Pilgrims had hardly weathered their first hard winter when they rebuilt one of their shallops and sent it northward on fishing and trading voyages; and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and another to open up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Pynchon was making Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the interior, though an overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits and compelling the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of all the colonies, New Haven was the most distinctly commercial. Stephen Goodyear built a trucking house on an island below the great falls of the Housatonic in 1642; other New Haven colonists engaged in ventures on Delaware Bay; and in 1645, the colony endeavored to open a direct trade with England. But nearly every New Haven enterprise failed, and by 1660 the wealth of the colony had materially diminished and the settlement had become "little else than a colony of discouraged farmers." Among all the colonies in New England and elsewhere there was considerable coasting traffic, and vessels went to Newfoundland and Bermuda, and even to the distant West Indies, to Madeira, and to Bilboa across the ocean. Ever since Winthrop built the _Blessing of the Bay_ in 1631, the first sea-going craft launched in New England, Massachusetts had been the leading commercial colony, and her vessels occasionally made the long triangular voyage to Jamaica, and England, and back to the Bay. The vessels carried planks, pipe staves, furs, fish, and provisions, and exchanged them for sugar, molasses, household goods, and other wares and commodities needed for the comfort and convenience of the colonists.