on that connected itself with a neighbor's
daughter who dressed in bright red mousseline-delaine and wore an
immense hoop, played the fiddle and scandalized the community by her
manners, music and muslin. But the young men were all in love with her
and she held a nightly court in a little brown house in that part of the
town called Hard Scrabble. She took the pick of her admirers, was
married at eighteen, bore what Aeschylus calls the "divine load" in
fifteen travails, fourteen sons and one daughter, and lived to play her
fiddle to more than thirty grandchildren. The community at length became
reconciled to her, although she continued to wear to the end of her life
red gowns and a bulging hoop--the women gossips now said to conceal her
usual condition. To me she was and is the Scarlet Woman, an inhabitant
not of Rome or Babylon, but of a town where I am the supreme pontiff, a
town not made of galvanized iron nor stone nor brick, but
weather-stained boards with sometimes a touch of red paint.

Doubtless many people sigh for the days when Christmas was not, for it
has become a burden in its secular observances, a game of give and take.
I never heard of the day in my childhood. Scarcely will this be
believed, so difficult is it to realise that a present universal custom,
and one so linked with religious sentiment, has not always existed;
nevertheless it is true. If I were relating something that happened
yesterday, or the day before, I should not be much chagrined to be
disputed and to find myself in error; but the memory of the events of
childhood is authentic and indisputable. There was no Christmas for
children in Bellingham, or I should remember it as vividly as I do Fast
Day, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and Town Meeting Day. The last named
was the first holiday of the year for the male population, occurring on
the first Tuesday in March. It was a day when the solid men of the town
came to the front and sat in high seats, dignified and important; when
the less solid or more gay got drunk, and the boys played games about
the town-house, and ate as many buns as they had cents to buy. The
town-house of Bellingham was an old Universalist church whose society
had been uprooted and driven away by the sermons, prayers and
persecutions of the Baptist brethren and sisters. It must have been an
ancient building as it had a high pulpit, a sounding board still higher
and square pews. I used to go in when hungry to buy the buns, wh