et, and
straps and buckles so arranged that when one was buckled down escape was
impossible. On the opposite end of the pole a rope was tied, the end
hanging down to the ground. This contrivance, to-day unknown, was once
quite familiar to English civilization, and was called the
"ducking-stool." The founders of the American, colonies, whatever may
have been their original designs for the promotion of universal
happiness, found it necessary very soon to allot a portion of the virgin
soil to the humiliation, punishment and degradation of their fellow
creatures.

Thus we find, in addition to the prison, the whipping-post and the
pillory, the ducking-stool. From the vast throng assembled about the
pond on that mild June day in 1653, one might suppose that the entire
colony had turned out to witness some great event. Nearly four years
before the opening of our story, Cromwell had established the
"Commonwealth" in England; but it was not until 1653 that the
Parliament party, or "Roundheads," as they were contemptuously termed,
conquered the colony of Virginia. Many of the royalists were still
elected to the House of Burgesses, and the cavaliers in boots and lace,
with riding-whips in hand, predominated in the throng we have just
described. The continual neighing of horses in the woods told of the
arrival of fresh troops of planters and fox-hunting cavaliers.

The merry cavalier was easily distinguished from the sedate Puritan. The
latter gazed solemnly on the instrument of torture as a thing essential
to the performance of a duty, while the cavaliers seemed to have come
more for the enjoyment of some rare sport, than to witness an execution
of the law. Occasionally a snake-eyed aborigine mingled with the throng,
gazing in wonder on the scene, or a negro, granted a half-holiday, stood
grinning with barbarous delight on what was more sport than punishment
in his eyes.

There is something hideous about the ducking-stool in the present age of
reason and enlightenment, more especially as it was designed to punish
the weaker sex and usually those advanced in years. Before the ugly
machine and between it and the road which ran past the pond to the
village was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed,
plantain and such unsightly vegetation, which seemed to find something
congenial in the soil that bore an instrument for the torture of the
gentler sex; but on one side of the post and leaning against it was a
wild rosebus