early day it was a land of hope and promise, demanding incessant toil and the qualities of industry and fortitude that so conspicuously distinguished these settlers, but holding the reward of rich return for labor intelligently directed and inspired by the determination to succeed.

In the air of traditional gloom that surrounds the Puritan we see him sourly condemning all innocent amusements and acting as a killjoy, rather than fostering those normal pleasures of the people that were supposed to mark the light-hearted joyousness of the masses of Merry England. But the sports of the English people were not so innocent as they appear now, filtered through the pages of writers, colored by their surroundings; and in an age when life was held less sacred and passion was unrestrained by convention, brutality was mated with pleasure. It is an idyllic picture we have of the Maypole set up on the village green, innocent young girls dancing about it garlanded with flowers, the men with rough good humor finding pleasure in cracking each other over the heads with quarter staves or bending their sinews in wrestling bouts. This is the stage-setting familiar to every student of English literature who plaintively but sincerely regrets that the good old times with their simple amusements have passed away; but few know that before the Maypole was set up rural England imitated the practices of Rome and spent a night of saturnalia in the woods. The Puritans frowned,

not on the innocent pleasures of the Maypole, but on the immorality that had been sanctioned by custom to be part of its observances. For the same reason, the worrying to death by dogs of a chained bull or bear was as repugnant to men of a finer nature as the slaughter of rats by a terrier is to the great majority of decent men to-day. But the gentle Puritan might still take part in a sporting event. Bull-baiting and cockfighting he banned, but the wolf, who was his natural enemy, might be harried and hunted, and wolf-baiting was as popular in New England as bull-baiting was in Old England.

Many of the customs of Old England the Puritans brought with them, but some of them were wisely left behind, and the saturnalian observance of the first of May was not to their liking. When Morton set up his Maypole at Merry Mount, “drinking and dancing aboute it many days together, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddes Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye madd Bacchinalians," as Bradford tells us, the Puritans were naturally shocked, and saw the necessity, for moral no less than social reasons, for the maintenance of discipline as well as to prevent the corruption of the Indians, of promptly suppressing such improper and dangerous proceed

ings. The Maypole was cut down and Governor Endicott "rebuked them for their profannes, and admonished them to look ther should be better walking." The Puritans frowned on the theatre, because the drama of that age was an appeal to lust and passion; it was profane and gross; it emphasized the worst side of man and woman; the vice of the English people was gambling, and gaming was sternly prohibited; dancing was also under the ban because it was associated in the Puritan mind with worse practices.”

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But in their own way the Puritans found means of amusement. Many writers have attempted to demonstrate that in every observance of every relation of life the Puritan gave to it a religious symbolism, and in support of that they point to an institution peculiarly American, Thanksgiving. Now here again we see how institutions lose their original meaning, precisely as certain words are given a modern interpretation quite foreign to their significance a century or so ago. The raison d'être for the modern Thanksgiving is to give praise for Divine blessings, and many persons in obedience to the suggestion of the President and Governors go to church, but the majority regard the day as a secular holiday and treat it as a pause in their daily toil instead of to be set apart for the searching of hearts. And in this they simply follow the example set by the Pilgrims (again there is that confusion of associating events with the Puritan

that belonged to the Pilgrims) when they celebrated their first Thanksgiving. Mourt in his Relation shows that it was a holiday and not a holy day, and there is not the slightest hint that it was given a religious observance. "Our harvest being gotten in," the chronicler writes, "our Governor sent foure men on fowling, that we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors. They foure in one day killed as much fowle, as, with a little help beside, served the Company almost a weeke, at which time, amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest, their greatest King, Massasoyt, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deere, which they brought to the Plantation, and bestowed on our Governor, and vpon the Captaine, and others." Entertainment and feasting for three days and the exercise of arms, which the modern writer would express as a military parade, do not convey the impression of a day of gloom, which began with church services and ended with the whole community painfully reading the Bible as a matter of duty and longing for the day to close and bring with it relief from this oppressive method of thanking the Lord for His manifold blessings. The periodical fast days and feast days, sanctified by the ancient reverence of the

1 Mourt's Relation, p. 133.

Church, were scrupulously disregarded and discountenanced in New England. But, for special occasions, fasts and thanksgivings were frequently observed by the whole community, or by single churches; and after a time, in the place of Good Friday and of Christmas, a Fast Day was regularly kept at the season of annual planting, and a feast day (Thanksgiving) at the time of the ingathering of the harvest.1

The hard-faced, atrabilious, earnest-eyed race, stiff from long wrestling with the Lord in Prayer, and who had taught Satan to dread the new Puritan hug is a familiar figure, but Puritan humor is less often remembered. To pun may be the lowest form of humor and indicative of only a rudimentary perception of wit, but it at least shows that there is an appreciation of the lighter side of life. The writings of the Puritan reveal this tendency, and a vein of dry, sarcastic, ironic humor is to be found in their sermons and religious discourses. It was humor not without its sting, but it evidenced that they had a lively sense of the ridiculous and were not averse to malevolent pleasantry. Yankee wit has become proverbial, and it survives in the literature that is typical of Massachusetts, in the writings of Lowell and Holmes; in a lesser degree it may be found in the works of Emerson and Hawthorne, and it occasionally flashes out in Whittier.

1 Palfrey: History of New England, vol. ii, p. 44; cf. W. DeLoss Love, Jr.: The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England.

Lowell: Biglow Papers.