ir stalwart religion will want to claim them as
ancestors, but it will be too late then; for since these latter-day folks
lie about the Puritans now, we will not believe them when they want to get
into the illustrious genealogical line.

East Hampton has always been a place of good morals. One of the earliest
Puritan regulations of this place was that licensed liquor-sellers should
not sell to the young, and that half a pint only should be given to four
men--an amount so small that most drinkers would consider it only a
tantalization. A woman here, in those days, was sentenced "to pay a fine of
fifteen dollars, or to stand one hour with a cleft stick upon her tongue,
for saying that her husband had brought her to a place where there was
neither gospel nor magistracy." She deserved punishment of some kind, but
they ought to have let her off with a fine, for no woman's tongue ought to
be interfered with. When in olden time a Yankee peddler with the measles
went to church here on the Sabbath for the purpose of selling his
knick-knacks, his behavior was considered so perfidious that before the
peddler left town the next morning the young men gave him a free ride upon
what seems to us an uncomfortable and insufficient vehicle, namely, a rail,
and then dropped him into the duck-pond. But such conduct was not
sanctioned by the better people of the place. Nothing could be more
unwholesome for a man with the measles than a plunge in a duck-pond, and so
the peddler recovered one thousand dollars damage. So you see that every
form of misdemeanor was sternly put down. Think of the high state of morals
and religion which induced this people, at an early day, at a political
town-meeting, to adopt this decree: "We do sociate and conjoin ourselves
and successors to be one town or corporation, and do for ourselves and our
successors, and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter,
enter into combination and confederation together to maintain and preserve
the purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ which we now possess."

The pledge of that day has been fully kept; and for sobriety, industry,
abhorrence of evil and adherence to an unmixed gospel, we know not the
equal of this place.

That document of two centuries ago reads strangely behind the times, but it
will be some hundreds of years yet before other communities come up to the
point where that document stops. All our laws and institutions are yet to
be Christianize