er-son of the Pilgrim
Father, Mr. Robinson, and had come to New England in the _Mayflower_
when she made her first memorable voyage to Plymouth, thirty-two
years before.

Mathew Stevens had removed with his family from New Plymouth to Boston
the year before the king of England lost his head. This man was a
brother to the father of John Stevens of Virginia, and though he had
Spanish blood in his veins, he was a Puritan. The Puritan of
Massachusetts was, at this time, the straitest of his sect, an
unflinching egotist, who regarded himself as eminently his "brother's
keeper," whose constant business it was to save his fellow-men from sin
and error, sitting in judgment upon their belief and actions with the
authority of a divinely appointed high priest. His laws, found on the
statute books of the colony, or divulged in the records of court
proceedings, exhibit the salient points in his stern and inflexible
character, as a self-constituted censor and a conservator of the moral
and spiritual destiny of his fellow-mortals. A fine was imposed on
every woman wearing her hair cut short like a man's; all gaming for
amusement or gain was forbidden, and cards and dice were not permitted
in the colony. A father was fined if his daughter did not spin as much
flax or wool as the selectmen required of her. No Jesuit or Roman
Catholic priest was permitted to make his residence within the colony.
All persons were forbidden to run or even walk, "except to and from
church" on Sunday, and a burglar, because he committed his crime on that
sacred day, was to have one of his ears cut off. John Wedgewood was
placed in the stocks for being in the company of drunkards. Thomas
Petit, for "suspicion of slander, idleness and stubbornness," was
severely whipped. Captain Lowell, a dashing ladies' man, more of a
cavalier and modern society fop than a sober Puritan, was admonished to
"take heed of his light carriage." The records show that Josias
Plaistowe, for stealing four baskets of corn from the Indians, was
ordered to return to them eight baskets, to be fined five pounds, and
thereafter to "be called by the name of Josias, and not Mr. Plaistowe,
as formerly." The grand jurors were directed to admonish those who wore
apparel too costly for their income, and, if they did not heed the
warning, to fine them, and in the year 1646 there was enacted a law in
Massachusetts which imposed a penalty of flogging for kissing a woman
on the street, even in the w