who had boisterously quaffed a
health to the king was confined by the legs in the latter. Side by
side on the meeting-house steps stood a male and a female figure. The
man was a tall, lean, haggard personification of fanaticism, bearing
on his breast this label, "A WANTON GOSPELLER," which betokened that
he had dared to give interpretations of Holy Writ unsanctioned by the
infallible judgment of the civil and religious rulers. His aspect
showed no lack of zeal to maintain his heterodoxies even at the stake.
The woman wore a cleft stick on her tongue, in appropriate retribution
for having wagged that unruly member against the elders of the church,
and her countenance and gestures gave much cause to apprehend that the
moment the stick should be removed a repetition of the offence would
demand new ingenuity in chastising it.

The above-mentioned individuals had been sentenced to undergo their
various modes of ignominy for the space of one hour at noonday. But
among the crowd were several whose punishment would be lifelong--some
whose ears had been cropped like those of puppy-dogs, others whose
cheeks had been branded with the initials of their misdemeanors; one
with his nostrils slit and seared, and another with a halter about his
neck, which he was forbidden ever to take off or to conceal beneath
his garments. Methinks he must have been grievously tempted to affix
the other end of the rope to some convenient beam or bough. There was
likewise a young woman with no mean share of beauty whose doom it was
to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown in the eyes of all the
world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that
initial signified. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate
creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth with golden
thread and the nicest art of needlework; so that the capital A might
have been thought to mean "Admirable," or anything rather than
"Adulteress."

Let not the reader argue from any of these evidences of iniquity that
the times of the Puritans were more vicious than our own, when as we
pass along the very street of this sketch we discern no badge of
infamy on man or woman. It was the policy of our ancestors to search
out even the most secret sins and expose them to shame, without fear
or favor, in the broadest light of the noonday sun. Were such the
custom now, perchance we might find materials for a no less piquant
sketch than the above.

Except th