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One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at this season, when the Maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshipped in groves then.
Running naked through the public streets, coming into meeting dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their feet, or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body.
H. B. Adams, The Germanic Origin of New England Towns, Saxon Tithing-Men in America, Norman Constables in America, Village Communities of Cape Ann and Salem; II., x. Edward Channing, Town and County Government in the English Colonies of North America; IV., xi.-xii. Melville Egleston, The Land System of the New England Colonies; VII., vii.-ix. C. M. Andrews, The River Towns of Connecticut.
The meeting-house which our boy remembers was a high, square building, without a steeple. Within it had a lofty pulpit, with doors underneath and closets where sacred things were kept, and where the tithing-men were supposed to imprison bad boys.
Even their lawlessness held more circumspectness than is known to the most decorous boy of to-day, and it gained with every generation, till neither tithing-men nor constables had further power to restrain it, the Puritans of the eighteenth century wailing over the godlessness and degeneracy of the age as strenuously as the pessimists of the nineteenth.
The meeting-house which our boy remembers was a high, square building, without a steeple. Within it had a lofty pulpit, with doors underneath and closets where sacred things were kept, and where the tithing-men were supposed to imprison bad boys.
However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home; there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together. But we must give our attention to the sermon.
At the other side of the hall were several long wooden drinking-troughs, which were used for the storing of pikes and scythes. Special messengers and tithing-men had been sent out to scour the country for arms, who, as they returned, placed their prizes here under the care of the armourer-general.
These bombs, at any rate, never failed to cause consternation and fright in Coniston, although they never did any harm. One thing noticeable, they were always fired in Jethro's absence. And the bombardier was always Chester Perkins, son of the most unbending and rigorous of tithing-men, but Chester resembled his father in no particular save that he, too, was a deacon and a pillar of the church.
Staid and matter of fact as the Merrimac is, it has, nevertheless, certain capricious and eccentric tributaries; the Powow, for instance, with its eighty feet fall in a few rods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnigh perpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting- house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt of Puritan tithing-men.
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