doubt whether any man now living has witnessed a like occurrence. A severer climate and harsher visitations seem strictly in keeping with the character of the people. The religious element which led to the settlement of New England still strongly asserted itself in the life and customs of the colony. Wealth had hardly yet begun to exercise its subtle influence upon it. Indeed, though almost all were prosperous there was little of what can properly be called wealth in the community, but there was equally little poverty. The people lived in rude abundance, and I do not believe that during the first hundred years of the history of Weymouth as many persons received public aid of the town. Certainly the method of dealing with pauperism, where it occasionally appears in the records, was primitive in the extreme, and scarcely commends itself to modern theories.[82] But as a rule there appears to have been a strikingly equal division of such property as the people had, which lay almost wholly in their cattle and their lands; accumulation had scarcely begun. We are always accustomed to regard the past as a better and purer time than the present,--there is a vague, traditional simplicity and innocence hanging about it almost Arcadian in character. I can find no ground on which to base this pleasant fancy. Taken altogether I do not believe that the morals of Weymouth or of her sister towns were on the average as good in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth. The people were sterner and graver,--the law and the magistrate were more severe, but human nature was the same and would have vent. There was, I am inclined to think, more hypocrisy in those days than now, but I have seen nothing which has led me to believe that the women were more chaste, or that the men were more temperate, or that, in proportion to population, fewer or less degrading crimes were perpetrated. Certainly the earlier generations were as a race not so charitable as their descendants, and less of a spirit of kindly Christianity prevailed among them. But in those days enjoyment itself was almost a crime, and every pleasure was thought to be a lure of the devil and close upon the boundary line to guilt. Holidays, accordingly, were few and far between. The May-pole disappeared with the wild Morton of Merry Mount. During the colonial period, election or training day was what the Fourth of July is to us,--the great anniversary of the year, on which the whole community came as near to unbending as it knew how. Thanksgiving and the annual fast were both church days; Guy Fawkes’ day was notorious for its noisy revels; Sunday was devoted to nominal rest and veritable exhortation. On that day, every one not an infant attended church, and the infants were left alone at home.[83] From Saturday evening to Monday morning all labor ceased,--the voices of the children were hushed,--the blinds were drawn, and a quiet, which was not rest, pervaded the town.