what they had been so long at work on.
This, instead of being a thing to sneer at, is one of the very best
elements in a community, one of the best securities of character. For
sudden leaps to fortune are given to but few, and are seldom lasting,
and the results of sudden inflations are more disastrous even to a
community than to isolated individuals, as may be abundantly proved by
the early history of Virginia. It was not meanness that made the wiry
New England farmer so cautious and exacting in trade, when the pennies
he saved sent his son through college. It was not meanness which made
him refuse to spend money; he had no money to spend, and it was a high
sense of honor that kept him from running in debt. It was not meanness
which so justly ordered conditions and cared for the unfortunate that
even in those days of horrible drunkenness often there would not be a
pauper in the entire village. It has been a reproach that in some towns
the few town poor were vendued out to be cared for; the mode was harsh
in its wording, and unfeeling in method, but in reality the pauper found
a home. I have known cases where the pauper was not only supported but
cherished in the families to whose lot she fell.

CHAPTER XIV

TRAVEL, TRANSPORTATION, AND TAVERNS

Wherever the earliest colonists settled in America, they had to adopt
the modes of travel and the ways of getting from place to place of their
predecessors and new neighbors, the Indians. These were first--and
generally--to walk on their own stout legs; second, to go wherever they
could by water, in boats. In Maryland and Virginia, where for a long
time nearly all settlers tried to build their homes on the banks of the
rivers and bays, the travel was almost entirely by boats; as it was
between settlements on all the great rivers, the Hudson, Connecticut,
and Merrimac.

Between the large settlements in Massachusetts--Boston, Salem, and
Plymouth--travel was preferably, when the weather permitted, in boats.
The colonists went in canoes, or pinnaces, shaped and made exactly like
the birch-bark canoes of the Canadian Indians to-day; and in dugouts,
which were formed from hollowed pine-logs, usually about twenty feet
long and two or three feet wide; both of these were made for them by the
Indians. It was said that one Indian, working alone, felling the
pine-tree by the primitive way of burning and scraping off the charred
parts with a stone tool called a celt (for the Indi