night with rattle and lantern, called out the hours and
the state of the weather, and stopped and demanded the name of every
person found walking the streets after nine o'clock. To travel on Sunday
was a serious and punishable offense, as it was on any day to smoke in
the streets, or run from house to house with hot coals, which in those
days, when there were no matches, were often used instead of flint and
steel to light fires.

[Footnote 1: From an old loom in the National Museum, Washington.]

[Illustration: Colonial mansion in Charleston]

Travel between the large towns was almost entirely by sailing vessel, or
on horseback. The first stagecoach-and-four in New England began its
trips in 1744. The first stage between New York and Philadelphia was not
set up till 1756, and spent three days on the road.

%97. The Three Groups of Colonies.%--It has always been usual to
arrange the colonies in three groups: 1. The Eastern or New England
Colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut).
2. The Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and
Delaware). 3. The Southern Colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia). Now, this arrangement is good not only
from a geographical point of view, but also because the people, the
customs, the manners, the occupations, in each of these groups were very
unlike the people and the ways of living in the others.

[Illustration: New England mansion]

%98. Occupations in New England.%--In New England the colonists were
almost entirely English, though there were some Scotch, some
Scotch-Irish, a few Huguenot refugees from France, and, in Rhode Island,
a few Portuguese Jews. As the climate and soil did not admit of raising
any great staple, such as rice or tobacco, the people "took to the sea."
They cut down trees, with which the land was covered, built ships, and
sailed away to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for cod, and to the
whale fisheries for oil. They went to the English, Dutch, and Spanish
West Indian Islands, with flour, salt meat, horses, oxen; with salted
salmon, cod, and mackerel; with staves for barrels; with onions and
salted oysters. In return, they came back with sugar, molasses, cotton,
wool, logwood, and Spanish dollars with which the New England Colonies
paid for the goods they took from England. They went to Spain, where
their ships were often sold, the captains chartering English vessels and
coming home w