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It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath. Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had intended for the day's labor.
They make a terrible noise when they grind the wheat." Frisky Squirrel stopped sobbing then. He was glad that his mother knew exactly what had happened. But he made up his mind that whenever he wanted any wheat-kernels to eat he would not go to the gristmill for them. Luckily the gristmill had not quite all the wheat in the world. Fun on the Milldam
Still he took a kind of pleasure in dropping in of an evening to Deacon Enos's fire, to recount the various matters which he had taken or was to take in hand; at one time to narrate "how he had been over the milldam, telling old Granny Clark that she could get the law of Seth Scran about that pasture lot," or else "how he had told Ziah Bacon's widow that she had a right to shut up Bill Scranton's pig every time she caught him in front of her house."
The story of the fowl corroborated, the sugar-bush became an object of investigation. Milldam was ten miles away, and it was quite possible for the young man to have ridden there and back between the hour when Tunk left him and that of sunrise when he met Mrs. Vaughn at her door.
What if the falling tide leaves the flats bare and they may not win to the mooring, but must lie at anchor off the channel edge until morning shows gray through the rain? They have won the golden fleece of adventure from the blue sea to eastward and sailed home with it. For two hundred years the water has rippled over the sill on which once firmly set the gate to the old milldam.
Invective against a refractory House of Burgesses brought them a quarter of a mile upon their way; the necessity for an act to encourage adventurers in iron works carried them past a milldam; and frauds in the customs enabled them to reach a crossroads ordinary, where the Colonel ordered a halt, and called for a tankard of ale.
Sometimes ninety per cent. of the water of a stream is taken away to drive a milldam or do work, and only ten per cent. can be spared to trickle down the half-dry channel and do nothing but reflect the bright sun and help the little flowers and the grass to grow.
Then, under his leadership, and in more regular order, the formidable band of horsemen pursued their march to those distant solitudes where happiness awaited their chieftain and his bride. "It's all over, Frank; I've gone and done it." "Gone and done what, you spooney?" "Proposed." "Proposed what? a match at billiards, a trot on the milldam, or a main of cocks?"
A man working on a milldam kept on for an hour after nightfall on Saturday to finish it, and next day his child fell into a well and was drowned. The father confessed it as a judgment of God for his Sabbath-breaking. There is not unfrequent mention of some woman driven by religious brooding to frenzy, sometimes to murder.
The virago lopped the genealogical tree, by demanding haughtily, "If a stream of rushing water acknowledged any relation with the portion withdrawn from it for the mean domestic uses of those who dwelt on its banks?" "Vera true, kinswoman," said the Bailie; "but for a' that, the burn wad be glad to hae the milldam back again in simmer, when the chuckie-stanes are white in the sun.
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