This service was set down to his credit when in Christmas week the watchman came to the door to “bid New Years.” It was one of the customs of the Old Town that came down from the earliest days, happily shorn of some of its mediæval aspects. For then he came not alone, but the whole body of watchmen together, a kind of reconnoissance in force, to which the fact that the public executioner came with them lent a suggestion which no one could afford to let go unheeded. That it really was a kind of official blackmail is made apparent by certain ordinances passed in the Sixteenth Century which forbade the practice and fixed a regular schedule of charges for these public servants. The executioner was to have one dollar for chopping off a head or hanging a man, half a dollar for an ear, a dollar and a half for burning a witch at the stake, and so forth. It was not much. When one reads of his using twenty-two loads of wood for burning a single witch, it seems but poor pickings for a hard-worked man; but then he made up for it by having his hands full. He burned thirteen witches between the years 1572 and 1652, and beheaded one. Of ears and such small fry no account seems to have been kept. Besides all this he was street-cleaning commissioner[19] and offal contractor, with the express proviso, however, that he must not himself engage in the latter business as beneath his dignity, but must farm it out to the town chimney-sweep. It will be seen that the executioner was by no means a disreputable man, but a functionary of importance who could not be allowed to go begging from door to door. As for the watchmen, they were ordered to desist not merely from that practice, but from monopolizing the moving business and from bossing weddings held in the Town Hall; likewise they must do no harm to drunken men in the street, but must help them home. One look at the mug they drank from at council meetings and still keep at the Town Hall gives a clew to the wherefore of this last ordinance: the councilmen themselves might have some trouble navigating after a protracted session. [Illustration: THE CHIMNEY-SWEEP.]